Randal Marlin
American-born Canadian philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who specializes in the study of propaganda.
There is arguably something wrong with a method of persuasion that cannot pass the test of publicity.
Exposure as a propagandist is fatal to the would-be persuader.
Party politics in modern democratic society means pandering to a wide variety of different groups and sympathizing with their often quite base motives, such as revenge, power, booty, and spoils, to maintain the necessary level of support.
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.
Any restrictions to freedom of expression will always open the door to possible others, because analogical reasoning can mount arguments showing why this or that class of objects is closely similar to those for which exceptions have been made.
Anyone familiar with the marvels of the Worldwide Web can hardly fail to see that we have entered a new era in communications on a scale perhaps comparable to the invention of the Gutenberg press.
In modern times sound policy-making must often come to grips with numbers.
There are many special interests skilful at manipulating circumstances and communications in such a way as to benefit their own ends and not necessarily the public good.
The specific media my change, but the principles of human nature have remained fairly constant over the millenia.
The special harm attaching to prior restraint is that the government can keep materials from reaching the public, so there can be no accountability, no judgment by the people that the power to suppress was wrongly exercised.
When you give false information you tend to restrict the freedom of choice to others.
Propaganda analysis can contribute to world peace by exposing those techniques that lead to armed conflict by creating misapprehension of reality.
To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, an alert citizenry today should take the trouble to learn how easy it can be for a powerful minority to manipulate information to win the support-or the indifference-of the majority towards an action.
If you can show that something is to a person's advantage, they have an attractive reason for doing that thing.
Once we recognize the power of propaganda, we need to ask whether its exercise is consistent with those democratic ideals to which lip-service is commonly accorded.
When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated.
We live in a time when complex ethical questions are easily subordinated to the demands of efficiency, profit maximization, and maintenance or furthering of political power.
If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.
In a general way, a major goal of the propagandist is to seek some kind of authoritative backing for the belief he or she is propagating.
There are many other ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. one obvious way is to simply lie.