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Rhetoric and Propaganda Guest lecture by Oliver Davies September 2013 Name: Authors Number: 001 From the moment people had a religion, from the moment there were politics, or from the moment people Just had an idea they want to spread there was propaganda. First it did not have a name. In 1622 the term propaganda appeared for the first time. This was when Pope Gregory XV established the Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith. From that moment, convincing a large amount of people about a given set of ideas was named as ‘propaganda’. Though, at that time it was mostly about beliefs and doctrines.
With the start of the First World War propaganda got it’s form as we know it nowadays. (Knight, 2011) During the war, propaganda was used to Justify the things that the government did wrong and to hide the horrors and failures on the battlefield. They used propaganda to distract people from the truth and create other beliefs about how bad those enemies were. Propaganda continues to be used in the modern world. From advertisers till governments, they tell you what they want you to believe and leave out all the other hinges Maybe some people can see what is left out, or what is not true.
Still most people will fall for the trick. In propaganda there is not one golden rule or technique. I think this is the reason why many people fail to distinguish propaganda from reality. Although there is not a golden rule there are many propaganda techniques. From all those techniques I chose the most appealing, interesting and most used ones to discus Name calling is propaganda technique which mostly is used as an attack. The propagandist links an idea or person with a negative symbol. By doing this they popes that the target group will dislike the idea or person because of the relation they make with the negative symbol.
A great example is FOX news. They ‘accidentally mentioned Obama as Osama and mentioned Osama Binnacle as Obama Binnacle. Another great example is the When you ride alone, you ride with (Fox. Com, 2012). Hitler’ poster. In order to fuel all the war machines, the Americans needed a lot of gasoline. The poster doesn’t make sense at all but the American people didn’t want to be related with Hitler and therefore started to drive together. Important sounding phrases. When looking a bit deeper into those phrases they actually make no sense, they are vague but they are definitely positive.
This technique is used to make a listener agree with what the speaker is saying. An example I like a lot is one from Beam’s presidential campaign in which he says: ‘Change We Can Believe in’. It does not mean anything but Change and Believe are two words people wanted to hear and had a positive message. Doublespeak is a technical to make bad thing look less bad. Instead of using words like explosion in the nuclear industry they tend to use ‘energetic disassembly, or inadvertently disclosed incorrect information’ when something the government bought was way to expansive.
By doing this they make a bad or unpleasant idea, or concept sound much better. Plain folk is about everyday normal human who try to convince that their idea’s are those of everybody, it tries to reflect the common sense of the people. This device is not only used by advertisers but also a lot by politicians. Some great examples are the recent presidents of America. Bush loved to fish and hated broccoli like many plain Americans, Ronald Reagan did a lot of wood chopping, and Bill Clinton loved rashly spy novels. (Denny, 2012) Fear is a propaganda technique I absolutely hate, due to this technique many people lived in fear.
With this technique the propagandist tells the audience to do a particular course of action because if they don’t a disaster will follow. To execute this propaganda technique well, there are four elements that need to be included. At first it needs to be a threat, secondly it needs to have a specific recommendation, third the recommendation must give the audience the perception that it’s effective, and at last the audience must have the perception that they can perform the recommended behavior (Smith, 2013) Out of Context Quotes is a propaganda technique that speaks for it self.
With this technique you mention a sentence or a few words from a quote from somebody else without mentioning the surrounding contexts. It is fairly easy to twist the meaning of somebody saying and make him sound totally different than he actually did. False Analogies is a propaganda technique that is easy to fall for and one of the most common techniques. In this technique you portray two things that are not as similar. When you are going to examine the comparison you must try to see if there is enough evidence available to support the comparison. You’re looking at how similar the items really are. He cause of B. The cause actually was a third factor or Just due to chance. A great example given by Oliver Davies is: “The more ice creams are sold, the higher likely that people will drown”. (Davies, 2013) The actual cause was that when it is hotter more people buy ice and there are also more people going for a swim. Black and White thinking is probably best explained with a quote. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” (Bush, 2001) (The Washington Post, 2001) As you an read in the quote there is no thing between with us or with the terrorist, there really are only two choices.
The last technique I would like to discus is Lying. The previous techniques I chose because they are most common and used a lot. The reason I chose lying is because I do not totally agree with it. I do not see lying as a real propaganda technique. I think it does not matter which technique you use, you are always sort of lying. You are trying to make people believe things that are not true. It is true, when you lie you really tell something different than reality but what is the different with making people believe something with the help of a lie or with not telling the real story and twisting thing around?