Randal Marlin
American-born Canadian philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who specializes in the study of propaganda.
If you can show that something is to a person's advantage, they have an attractive reason for doing that thing.
The liar wants to be believed, but lying undermines the foundation for credibility.
Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.
The best goal for propaganda analysis is to develop such an understanding of the phenomenon that it will no longer be profitable for people to engage in it.
Down to the present day the luminous image of democracy has often served as a pretext for the most undemocratic actions.
When we consider propaganda as the attempt to shape the thoughts and feelings of others, in ways conforming to the aims of the communicator, we find a vast array of different examples throughout history.
Small town people assume you are a friend if you simply remember their names.
It is true that advertising often gives information and is valuable for doing so, but some forms of advertising give precious little information, and even that little is wrong.
There are many other ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. one obvious way is to simply lie.
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.
If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.
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.
When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated.
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.
There is arguably something wrong with a method of persuasion that cannot pass the test of publicity.
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.
Propaganda analysis can contribute to world peace by exposing those techniques that lead to armed conflict by creating misapprehension of reality.
When you give false information you tend to restrict the freedom of choice to others.
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.
The specific media my change, but the principles of human nature have remained fairly constant over the millenia.