Propaganda

The Propaganda Exhibition at the British Library has been open since mid May, but I hadn't had a chance to go and see it until now.

When I booked I asked how long it would take to go around, as it was already 2.30 p.m., and was told just over an hour.   Well, I was there until a quarter to five, and wouldn't say I had studied everything in great detail.  

The full title was Propaganda - Power and Persuasion, and the aim of the exhibition was to look at the role propaganda played in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - a rather large undertaking, considering the wide definition they gave it.

It started with the origins of propaganda, when it had no negative connotations, but simply referred to the propagation of information, as by the Catholic Church.

Since then, of course, it has grown in scope, and become an important tool of governments, enabling them to direct and influence public opinion, and the second part of the exhibition looked at this aspect of propaganda under the heading of "Nation".     Governments use propaganda to build a strong, united state, inculcating shared values, beliefs and interests among the people.   They use it to bind people together and make them feel that they are part of something good and positive.  The cheap radios which the Germans produced and encouraged everyone to buy in the 1930s were an important tool in getting the message across to the population that Germany was a great nation.   One unusual item in this section was a recording of the National Anthems of a large number of countries - national anthems are frequently nationalistic, and are used to bind citizens together.

Equally, nations sometimes use propaganda to demonise other nations, and the third section was entitled "Enemy"  Posters from the Second World War clearly demonstrated this use of propaganda.

The fourth section was called "War", a time when propaganda really comes into its own.  Every nation at war needs to strengthen and encourage its own people, and produce, at the very least, dislike of the enemy.   Biased, or even completley false, information is one way of doing this, and it didn't end with the Second World War - it's still very much alive today, as in the case of Tony Blair saying that Saddam Hussain had WMDs and declaring that he could bomb London in 45 minutes.    Frankly, I thought he was a lying toad and said so to anyone who would listen, but a great many people believed him, and so we went to war.

The fifth section was on "Health" , and the way the government tries to influence behaviour, from the "Stope Smoking" campaigns to the "Don't Die of Ignorance" AIDS campaign and the "Green Cross Code".

Lastly, it looked at the 21st century, when propaganda is even more alive and well, with a hugely larger means of spreading instant information.   Now everyone can be a propagandist if they want, by posting information on the internet.

The sheer scope of the exhibition made it impossible to take more than the briefest look at each section, any one of which could have justified a complete exhibition just to itself. 

An intersting feature of the leaflet accompanying the exhibition was a "User's guide to basic techniques" or perhaps it should have been called "How to deceive people without them knowing it".   Either way, it outlined the way in which people, usually politicians, but also others such as salesmen, seek to influence how people think, not necessarily by telling outright lies, but by propagating half-truths, statements with just enough truth for people to believe them.