The history of propaganda

Thinking of propaganda some politicians' names are at once remembered, like Caesar, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Saddam Hussein.
The history of propaganda has to tell then merely mentioning those names:

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Propaganda

"For propaganda is a communicative process of persuasion, and persuasion remains an integral part of human discourse in peace as well as in war. (...) propaganda is a process unique to human communication regardless of time, space and geographic location." (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, preface p. X)

The word propaganda is coming from the Catholic Church. In the 17th century the word was used in the fights against the Protestant Reformation (see Taylor, Munitions of the mind, p. 3).

Propaganda is using words - of course. But it furthermore uses a huge variety of tools for putting through its purpose. Some of them are: hymns, marches, parades, flags, colors, uniforms, all the typical insignias of the military are pieces of propaganda. And it is no coincidence that the standardization of the uniforms for the army were an invention of Louis XIV, for whom everything seemed to be theatre, a play, a game and all of that was taken into the huge propaganda-system that had to keep his prestige up high.

Propaganda makes us think and act in a way we probably would not have chosen to without its influence. Still, in most cases the degree of influence is impossible to know. Studies proving the efficiency of propaganda are doing nothing else but guessing in big parts. But it is efficient, that we know for sure. This is true for commercial advertisements as well as for political propaganda. Short messages are the most effective form of propaganda, look at posters for elections or at advertisements for any product.
The best or most effective propaganda is that which is wanted by the people. If propaganda meets the needs of the people then it has good chances to be extremely effective. And of course those needs can be "educated", as Jacques Ellul mentioned already in 1957, in his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

Political will suffers from the urgency of spreading propaganda. The will to change something - even if it was for the better - is hopelessly lost, if their is no prestige or aura around an idea. A certain amount of disinformation and propaganda is the perfect tool to get ideas through.

So, actually, what is the difference between disinformation and propaganda?
One difference is that the first one is directed at reason whereas propaganda also touches emotions, most of the time even prefers to influence emotions.

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The Romans

The Romans can be called the great inventors of myths with the purpose of propaganda. Think of Caesar, Augustus or Nero. Caesar wrote his war-documentation by using incredible (e.g. the numbers of hostile soldiers) but he also emphasized the barbarity of the foe, creating images of hatred. People back at home had to believe these manipulative stories.
Or Augustus: he reunited the Roman Empire; part of his power was due to huge efforts in propaganda, visible e.g. in the mass of coins showing his face, being sent all over the empire. He understood very well, that different cultures used different symbols - and he used them for his propaganda.
Politically the Roman army was an important factor. Propaganda in that case was used for the soldiers on the one hand, but on the other hand also for demonstrating the power of the army to the people, so they could trust in its strength. Even then security was an essential factor of politics. As long as the army functioned, the Roman Empire did as well (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p. 48).

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The Big Five of Commercial Media

After a number of mergers and acquisitions five powerful media conglomerates lead the world's content production and distribution. They operate on an international basis with subsidiaries all around the globe and engage in every imaginable kind of media industry.

Table: The World's Leading Media Companies

Media Company

1998 Revenues

(in US$)

Property/Corporate Information

AOL Time Warner (US)

26,838.000.000*

http://www.timewarner.com/corp/about/timewarnerinc/corporate/index.html

Disney (US)

22,976.000.000

http://www.disney.com

Bertelsmann (GER)

16,389.000.000

http://www.bertelsmann.com/facts/report/report.cfm

News Corporation (AUS)

12,841.000.000

http://www.newscorp.com/public/cor/cor_m.htm

Viacom (US)

12,100.000.000

http://www.viacom.com/global.tin



(* Revenues of Time Warner only (merger with AOL took place in January 2000)

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Introduction: The Substitution of Human Faculties with Technology: Computers and Robots

With the development of modern computing, starting in the 1940s, the substitution of human abilities with technology obtained a new dimension. The focus shifted from the replacement of pure physical power to the substitution of mental faculties. Following the early 1980s personal computers started to attain widespread use in offices and quickly became indispensable tools for office workers. The development of powerful computers combined with progresses in artificial intelligence research also led to the construction of sophisticated robots, which enabled a further rationalization of manufacturing processes.

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Association for Progressive Communication (APC)

The APC is a global federation of 24 non-profit Internet providers serving over 50,000 NGOs in 133 countries. Since 1990, APC has been supporting people and organizations worldwide, working together online for social, environmental and economic justice. The APC's network of members and partners spans the globe, with significant presence in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

History

Between 1982 and 1987 several independent, national, non-profit computer networks emerged as viable information and communication resources for activists and NGOs. The networks were founded to make new communication techniques available to movements working for social change.

In 1987, people at GreenNet in England began collaborating with their counterparts at the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) in the United States. These two networks started sharing electronic conference material and demonstrated that transnational electronic communications could serve international as well as domestic communities working for peace, human rights and the environment.

This innovation proved so successful that by late 1989, networks in Sweden, Canada, Brazil, Nicaragua and Australia were exchanging information with each other and with IGC and GreenNet. In the spring of 1990, these seven organizations founded the Association for Progressive communications to co-ordinate the operation and development of this emerging global network of networks.

Strategies and Policies

The APC defends and promotes non-commercial, productive online space for NGOs and collaborates with like-minded organizations to ensure that the information and communication needs of civil society are considered in telecommunications, donor and investment policy. The APC is committed to freedom of expression and exchange of information on the Internet.

The APC helps to build capacity between existing and emerging communication service providers.

The APC Women's Networking Support Program promotes gender-aware Internet design, implementation and use.

Through its African members, the APC is trying to strengthen indigenous information sharing and independent networking capacity on the continent.

Members of APC develop Internet products, resources and tools to meet the advocacy, collaboration and information publishing and management needs of civil society. Recent APC initiatives have included the APC Toolkit Project: Online Publishing and Collaboration for Activists and the Mission-Driven Business Planning Toolkit.

The APC also runs special projects like the Beijing+5, which shall enable non-governmental organizations to actively participate in the review of the Beijing Platform for Action.

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Cartoons

Cartoons' technique is simplicity.
Images are easier to remember than texts.
Frequently they show jokes about politicians, friendly or against the person shown. In the first decades of this century, cartoons were also used for propaganda against artists; remember the famous cartoons of Oscar Wilde being portrayed as a criminal, aiming to destroy his popularity.
As a tool in politics it had fatal consequences by determining stereotypes, which never again could be erased even if detected as pure disinformation. Most famous got the cartoons about Jews, which were not only distributed by Germans and Austrians but all over Europe; and already in the tens and twenties of our century. Most horrifying is the fact that many of those old, fascist and racist cartoons are coming back now, in slightly different design only.

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New Forms of Propaganda (in the 19th Century)

As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side.
Two ways existed:
a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral.
b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs.
Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances. CNN and the USA during the Gulf War demonstrated an example of that.

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The Kosovo-Crisis

During the Kosovo Crisis and during the war that followed, and probably also after it, all sides of the conflict were manipulating their people and others as well, whenever they could. Some of the propaganda shown on TV was as primitive as in World War II, others were subtler. This propaganda started by telling the history of the geographic point of discussion from the own point of view, it went on with the interpretation of the motives of the enemy and finally came to censorship, manipulation of the number of victims ( for more information see: http://www.oneworld.org/index_oc/kosovo/kadare.html , spreading of atrocity stories and so on.
Many journalists and scientists are still working to detect more propaganda and disinformation stories.

An interesting detail about this war was that more people than ever before took their information about the war out of the internet. In part this had to do with the biased TV-reports on all sides. All parties put their ideas and perspectives in the net, so one could get an overview of the different thoughts and types of disinformation.
One of the big lies of NATO was the numbers of destroyed military facilities in Serbia. After the war the numbers had to be corrected down to a ridiculous number of about 13 destroyed tanks. At the same time the numbers of civilian victims turned out to be much higher than NATO had admitted in the first line. The method how European and American people had been persuaded to support the NATO-bombings was the promise to bomb only targets of the military or military-related facilities. Nearly every day NATO had to stretch this interpretation, as many civilian houses got destroyed. A cynical word was created for this kind of excuse: collateral damage.

The Serbs were not better than Western governments and media, which worked together closely. Serb TV showed the bombed targets and compared persons like Bill Clinton to Adolf Hitler and called the NATO fascist. On the other hand pictures from the situation in Kosov@ were left out in their reports.

More:
http://www.voa.gov/editorials/08261.htm (91)
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/progresp/vol3/prog3n22.html (92)
http://www.serbia-info.com/news (93)
http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/Belgrade041399.html (94)
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/SAID/12320.html (95)

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Java Applets

Java applets are small programs that can be sent along with a Web page to a user. Java applets can perform interactive animations, immediate calculations, or other simple tasks without having to send a user request back to the server. They are written in Java, a platform-independent computer language, which was invented by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Source: Whatis.com

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Blaise Pascal

b. June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France
d. August 19, 1662, Paris, France

French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal's law of pressure, and propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his principle of intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.

INDEXCARD, 2/19
 
IBM

IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) manufactures and develops cumputer hardware equipment, application and sysem software, and related equipment.

IBM produced the first PC (Personal Computer), and its decision to make Microsoft DOS the standard operating system initiated Microsoft's rise to global dominance in PC software.

Business indicators:

1999 Sales: $ 86,548 (+ 7,2 % from 1998)

Market capitalization: $ 181 bn

Employees: approx. 291,000

Corporate website: www.ibm.com

http://www.ibm.com/
INDEXCARD, 3/19
 
cryptology

also called "the study of code". It includes both, cryptography and cryptoanalysis

INDEXCARD, 4/19
 
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

b. July 1, 1646, Leipzig
d. November 14, 1716, Hannover, Hanover

German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the differential and integral calculus. 1661, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student; there he came into contact with the thought of men who had revolutionized science and philosophy--men such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. In 1666 he wrote De Arte Combinatoria ("On the Art of Combination"), in which he formulated a model that is the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers.

INDEXCARD, 5/19
 
Virtual Marylin Monroe

This is the story of the virtual Marylyn Monroe created by MRALab in Switzerland. The biography features her personal and professional stories. This being the biography of a virtual being, it does not end with the present and includes, instead, a chapter on her destiny.

http://www.miralab.unige.ch/MARILYN/VIRTUAL/virtual.html

http://www.miralab.unige.ch/MARILYN/VIRTUAL/v...
INDEXCARD, 6/19
 
Enochian alphabet

Also "Angelic" language. Archaic language alphabet composed of 21 letters, discovered by John Dee and his partner Edward Kelley. It has its own grammar and syntax, but only a small sample of it has ever been translated to English.

INDEXCARD, 7/19
 
News Corporation

The News Corporation Ltd., a global media holding company, which governed News Limited (Australia), News International (U.K.), and News America Holdings Inc. (U.S.) was founded by the Australian-born newspaper publisher and media entrepreneur, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch's corporate interests center on newspaper, magazine, book, and electronic publishing; television broadcasting; and film and video production, principally in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

INDEXCARD, 8/19
 
Enigma

Device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was broken by a British intelligence system known as Ultra.

INDEXCARD, 9/19
 
Punch card, 1801

Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, an engineer and architect in Lyon, France, the punch cards laid the ground for automatic information processing. For the first time information was stored in binary format on perforated cardboard cards. In 1890 Hermann Hollerith used Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punch card technology for processing statistical data retrieved from the US census in 1890, thus speeding up data analysis from eight to three years. His application of Jacquard's invention was also used for programming computers and data processing until electronic data processing was introduced in the 1960's. - As with writing and calculating, administrative purposes account for the beginning of modern automatic data processing.

Paper tapes are a medium similar to Jacquard's punch cards. In 1857 Sir Charles Wheatstone applied them as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data for the first time. By their means, telegraph messages could be prepared off-line, sent ten times quicker (up to 400 words per minute), and stored. Later similar paper tapes were used for programming computers.

INDEXCARD, 10/19
 
1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT)

The 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, which focused on taking steps to protect copyright "in the digital age" among other provisions 1) makes clear that computer programs are protected as literary works, 2) the contracting parties must protect databases that constitute intellectual creations, 3) affords authors with the new right of making their works "available to the public", 4) gives authors the exclusive right to authorize "any communication to the public of their works, by wire or wireless means ... in such a way that members of the public may access these works from a place and at a time individually chosen by them." and 5) requires the contracting states to protect anti-copying technology and copyright management information that is embedded in any work covered by the treaty. The WCT is available on: http://www.wipo.int/documents/en/diplconf/distrib/94dc.htm



http://www.wipo.int/documents/en/diplconf/dis...
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Whitfield Diffie

Whitfield Diffie is an Engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-author of Privacy on the Line (MIT Press) in 1998 with Susan Landau. In 1976 Diffie and Martin Hellman developed public key cryptography, a system to send information without leaving it open to be read by everyone.

INDEXCARD, 12/19
 
Internet Engineering Steering Group

On behalf of the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Steering Group is responsible for the technical management of the evolution of the architecture, the standards and the protocols of the Net.

http://www.ietf.org/iesg.html

http://www.ietf.org/iesg.html
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Internet Architecture Board

On behalf of the Internet Society, the Internet Architecture Board oversees the evolution of the architecture, the standards and the protocols of the Net.

Internet Society: http://www.isoc.org/iab

http://www.isoc.org/
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Polybius Checkerboard


 

1

2

3

4

5

1

A

B

C

D

E

2

F

G

H

I

K

3

L

M

N

O

P

4

Q

R

S

T

U

5

V

W

X

Y

Z



It is a system, where letters get converted into numeric characters.
The numbers were not written down and sent but signaled with torches.

for example:
A=1-1
B=1-2
C=1-3
W=5-2

for more information see:
http://www.ftech.net/~monark/crypto/crypt/polybius.htm

http://www.ftech.net/~monark/crypto/crypt/pol...
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Network Information Center (NIC)

Network information centers are organizations responsible for registering and maintaining the domain names on the World Wide Web. Until competition in domain name registration was introduced, they were the only ones responsible. Most countries have their own network information center.

INDEXCARD, 16/19
 
AT&T

AT&T Corporation provides voice, data and video communications services to large and small businesses, consumers and government entities. AT&T and its subsidiaries furnish domestic and international long distance, regional, local and wireless communications services, cable television and Internet communications services. AT&T also provides billing, directory and calling card services to support its communications business. AT&T's primary lines of business are business services, consumer services, broadband services and wireless services. In addition, AT&T's other lines of business include network management and professional services through AT&T Solutions and international operations and ventures. In June 2000, AT&T completed the acquisition of MediaOne Group. With the addition of MediaOne's 5 million cable subscribers, AT&T becomes the country's largest cable operator, with about 16 million customers on the systems it owns and operates, which pass nearly 28 million American homes. (source: Yahoo)

Slogan: "It's all within your reach"

Business indicators:

Sales 1999: $ 62.391 bn (+ 17,2 % from 1998)

Market capitalization: $ 104 bn

Employees: 107,800

Corporate website: http://www.att.com http://www.att.com/
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The World Wide Web History Project

The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the World Wide Web. As result a vast of collection of historic video, audio, documents, and software is expected. The project's digital archive is currently under development.

http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

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New World Order

http://www.douzzer.ai.mit.edu:8080/conspiracy...
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/18...
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