Political and economic agendas change. People leave, get exchanged. Whereas one of the things that never seem to change is disinformation. Watching different kinds of cultures and regimes throughout history you will always find disinformation.
Its use is variable just like its tools. First of all it does not necessarily need words. It is possible to disinform in any kind of language (sounds, symbols, letters or with the help of the body). As it seems to have come into existence together with human communication, we need not even hope that it will disappear once in a while.
One could rather say: disinformation has always been there.
Instead of hoping to stop it we need to learn to live with it, detect it, restore it to consciousness. Even this will not be any insurance for not walking into the trap. It is an attempt, nothing else.
For detecting disinformation one needs to know what types of disinformation are possible and how they work. This site gives you some ideas about the history, tendencies and different types of disinformation, with the restriction that it will mostly be about the Western types of disinformation, as it is still harder to understand the media of disinformation in other cultures; and anyhow, many methods and tools run parallel in different cultures.
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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.
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"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." (
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
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
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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In 1870 the U.S.-American
for further details see:
Those who believe in it, call it the truth, those who simply like the idea, may call it a parallel science. Others call it disinformation, asking for the reasons to spread it. The turning to the inside, where there is no way out, produces a different reality. It shows that realities are always produced.
Political conservatives and racists like
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Disinformation might also be welcome:
While the ones criticize disinformation and try to fight against it, others do nothing against it. And others again seem to enjoy getting disinformed. How this works? It is the result of a society that does no longer want to live under the pressure of doing and hearing everything at the same time. Acceleration of life seems too fast. The only way to get out is to refuse certain things/messages/truths. Receiving disinformation can be more comfortable than getting so-called correct information. This is especially true for the readers of the yellow press. The yellow press lives on that perspective, the commodity of getting light news, mostly wrong news and lies - but those being wrapped up in nice pictures and stories about those who seem to reign the world.
The aim is the escape out of reality.
A surplus of information, information terror, can produce disinformation. The profusion can get exploited for disinformation. This works in that way that in the mass of information the individual has no possibility to get an overview of the different ways of thinking and to reach a stage of objective knowledge.
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Disinformation was seen as an appropriate tool of politics and rhetoric in ancient Greece. Most of all persuasion was used, which then was considered a type of art.
Religion was (and in many ways still is) the best disinformer or manipulator; prophecies were constructed to manipulate the population. The important thing was to use emotions and more than anything else fear as a tool for manipulation. If the oracle of Delphi said a war was to fight and would be won, then the Greek population - because of religious motives - was prepared to fight that war.
Propaganda was not only used in wars but also in daily life to bring people together and create a nation.
But poets, playwrights and other artists were manipulating as well. Their pieces of literature and plays were full of political messages with different ideologies behind. In the way how theatre at that time was part of life, it can be understood easily that those messages had not only entertainment's character but also a lot of political and social influence.
A different and very famous part of disinformation in ancient Greek history was the story of
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After World War II the importance of propaganda still increased, on the commercial level as well as on a political level, in the era of the Cold War. The propaganda institutions of the different countries wanted their people to think the right way, which meant, the national way. In the USA the McCarthy-era started, a totalitarian system in struggle against communism.
Cold War brought the era of spies with it, which was the perfect tool of disinformation. But the topic as a movie-genre seems still popular today, as the unchanged success of James Bond-movies show.
A huge net of propaganda was built up for threatening with the nuclear bomb: pretending that the enemy was even more dangerous than the effect of such a bomb.
And later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, disinformation found other fields of work, like the wars of the 1990s showed us.
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By the end of our century a new method of disinformation is gaining importance: disinformation by an overflow of information.
In the Gulf War, similar to the Vietnam War, journalists had little chance to report neutrally and correctly from the battlefields. Many times they staid in places far from the actual fightings - due to censorship.
In many ways the so-called video-war reminded of a series of commercials. No wonder, the Gulf War was the first war to have a commercial advertisement agency to do the war-propaganda for the USA. They worked hard in preventing the government from a destiny like the one of the Vietnam War, when the war most of all was lost in the American homes because of anti-war propaganda.
In an interview,
And this is true for both sides:
the baby milk plant:
Western bombs had destroyed a chemical weapon factory - that's what they claimed.
(
the life guard:
In December 1990, the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur published the story of Karim Abdallah al-Jabouri, Saddam Hussein's Life Guard who had fled from Iraq right after Iraq's invasion in Kuwait. Soon afterwards he was in a French TV-show, where he told atrocity stories about
the baby-incubator-story of Najirah
On the 10th of October 1991 a young refugee, called Najirah, from Kuwait spoke in front of the U.S.-congress. With a lot of tears she told that she had been working in a Kuwaiti hospital, when Iraqi soldiers came in, tore the babies out of the incubators and let them die on the floor. The pictures of this declaration went around the world and were one of the reasons why the U.S.-population wanted an intervention. In 1992 the journalist R. MacArthur was able to proof that the presented witness had been the daughter of the Kuwait-ambassador in the USA and that she had not been in that hospital or in Kuwait at the mentioned time.
By then the war was over and the manipulation of the population had taken place long ago.
For reading about the U.S.-propaganda tools during that war, like surrender passes, balloons, fake banknotes, threats and many more visit:
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The British set up a unique system for propaganda, involving GB, the USA and all the colonies. Most different agencies and civilians worked together, the civilians not always knowing about the machinery behind.
During the first years of the war the main goal was to achieve a U.S.-entry to the war on Britain's side of the battle. All propaganda was working on this, which meant to destroy Germany's reputation and create dark stereotypes about them, which was an easy task as the Germans were not only fatally unlucky but also very weak in propaganda. At the same time the U.S.-citizens' opinion about the war had to be influenced. The most promising way to do so was by starting with the men in power.
One of the most beloved tools at that time was the use of atrocity stories; and most popular among the masses were cartoons, furthermore posters, an element perfectioned by the USSR in World War I and II, and movies.
The particular thing was that British propaganda finally had an effect on the German population. Soldiers at the front and people at home received the disinformation messages, mostly pamphlets that had been dropped by aeroplanes or balloons.
Together with the development of the fightings turning against the Germans this kind of propaganda was able to discourage the people and make the German government lose its power of propaganda.
"Allied propaganda had caused a collapse of morale at home." (
After all this success it is hardly understandable that the British committed a huge error right after the war, an error that had bad consequences for the next war: being regarded as a tool of war and therefore regarded as inappropriate for times of peace, the propaganda institutions were closed. At about the same time similar ones were built up in Germany - first of all on paper, in
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d. June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire
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Joseph Stalin (1879-1953):
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