Manipulating the Masses
The term “propaganda” originally had no unsavory connotation. It derives from 17th-century Italy, where the Catholic Church was trying to counteract some of the inflammatory charges leveled against it by figures leading the Protestant Reformation. Pope Gregory XV created the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith). It was initiated not only to counteract disinformation from heresiarchs in northern Europe, but also to create materials for spreading the faith to indigenous peoples in the New World.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the term fell into public disfavor, since it was associated with disinformation campaigns from WWI. After the adrenaline of combat subsided and hostilities gave way to rational assessment, people started discovering the many ways their own governments had misled them in the lead-up to the war. They learned, for instance, about the first British Ministry of Propaganda. Lord Beaverbrook (a participant of the internationalist Milner Group) had tapped bestselling author Arnold Bennett to manage propaganda campaigns and recruit many of his friends (such as socialist author H.G. Wells) to come up with fabrications designed to manipulate the emotions of undiscriminating readers.
As historian Jo Fox writes in her article Atrocity Propaganda, “The power of atrocity stories derived in part from their ability to stand either alone, as singular acts of barbarism and moral depravity, or as a series of pre-meditated collective behaviours that condemned a nation. These shocking stories allowed propagandists to justify the war, encourage men to enlist, raise funds for war loans schemes, and shake the United States from its neutrality. The impact of such propaganda was enduring, lasting well into 1918 and beyond.”
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