Propaganda Author: Visit Amazon's Edward Bernays Page | Language: English | ISBN:
B000NR8354 | Format: EPUB
Propaganda Description
- Hardcover
- Publisher: Liveright; First Edition edition (1928)
- ASIN: B000NR8354
In a piece of amazingly brazen subterfuge, Bernays gives his book a title - "Propaganda" - which doesn't tell you what the book is ABOUT so much as what the book IS.
That is to say, as Mark Crispin Miller points out in the Introduction, the true nature of this book is to act as propaganda for propaganda. To get the full message on how to carry out propaganda you have to watch what Bernays is actually DOING. If all you take from the book is what Bernays says overtly about how to mount a propaganda campaign you will have missed the whole point of the book.
Bernay's central message is, in effect, "Never openly admit what propaganda is." And to this end he carefully confuses and conflates propaganda, PR and straightforward advertising. Indeed, although he uses the term "propagandist" a number of times in the book, he usually referred to himself as a "personal relations counsel".
As an example of how this confusion technique is used in this book, Bernays makes the perfectly reasonable claim that manufacturers need to use advertising to bring their products to the notice of the general public, but manages to blur the distinction between advertising and propaganda so as to make it seem that it is propaganda which is a perfectly natural process in a well-organized society.
First of all he sets us up by a series of seemingly reasonable but actually quite ludicrous statements (page 39 - it's a long Introduction):
"In practice, if everyone went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed."
[Yes it would, but don't we actually test many things in a less exhaustive way every time we go shopping?
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