Propaganda Piece

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/wiki/Propaganda Piecework

No, not even you in the back there.

Propaganda is generally defined as the communication of ideas, information, and rumors for the purpose of influencing opinions on a particular cause through emotional appeals - Propaganda Pieces (or just 'propaganda') are works produced through this method and commonly employed for this purpose.

In short, it's that thing you're not immune to.

The Propaganda Piece can be thought of as a deliberate Author Tract, which naturally means a lot of overlap between the tropes. Author Tracts are distinct in that they tend to be more personal to the creator in question, and can often be an unintended result of their choice in themes and/or their ability (or inability) to effectively communicate those themes and ideas, though it can also be very much intentional if said ideas are close to or part of their beliefs. Conversely, the Propaganda Piece is usually far less ambiguous (if at all) about its purpose as such, and is often the result of an effort to garner support for an organization or institution; the means through which propaganda is created and/or commissioned are often Propaganda Machines.

The concept of propaganda is Older Than Feudalism, with examples dating as far back as around 515 BCE; the term itself is Older Than Steam, and was derived in 1622 from a then-new administrative body of the Catholic Church called the "Congregatio de Propaganda Fide" (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), which was focused on "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catcholic countries. The negative connotations surfaced once it entered political lexicons in the mid-19th century.

Despite the unsavory and manipulative connotations associated with the term in modern times, "propaganda" is considered a historically neutral term, and there's quite a difference between a regular persuasive 'argument' designed to reinforce its proponents' own beliefs and an entire work dedicated to the same; likewise, there is also a difference between works that nakedly serve the purpose of propaganda at the expense of all else and those that are 'merely' poorly written - and both may still give off airs of "Do Not Do This Cool Thing", or else generally not helping their case, especially if its Aesop ends up broken or else lost.

Put simply, it's easy to finger a work as propaganda over nothing, especially for simply challenging your beliefs, and those who make "actual" propaganda will naturally not be that open about their purposes. Except when they are.

In terms of serving essential functions, many religions are naturally inclined towards spreading news of their faith. There is also some overlap with Public Service Announcements, which are designed to increase public attention towards matters of health and safety - as with many a form of Anvilicious media, Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped.

Subtropes include:

• Attack of the Political Ad
• Counterproductive Propaganda
• "Join the Army," They Said
• Scare Campaign
  • Demonization
• Wartime Cartoon

Compare:

• Do Not Do This Cool Thing, when the propaganda fails to properly "smear" its target in the eyes of its audience.
• Misaimed Fandom, when a group of people take away a 'wrong' or otherwise unintended message from the propaganda.
• Straw Man Has a Point, when the argument of its imagined-or-otherwise opposition actually has some merit.
• Streisand Effect, which can occur when propaganda attempts to draw attention away from something, but achieves the exact opposite instead.
• War Is Glorious and War Is Hell, often employed by pro/anti-war propaganda respectively.
• The War on Straw, where the opposing position is more "manufactured".

Contrast:

• Samizdat in the original sense.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Political? and What Do You Mean It's Not Didactic?: these can occur when a work is thought to be propaganda.

Compare and contrast Anvilicious. Often used to Scare'Em Straight. May be a sign that Big Brother Is Watching or Employing You. See also Canned Orders Over Loudspeaker, Patriotic Fervor and Propaganda Machine.

Examples of Propaganda Piece include:

In-Universe

Comic Books

• Block 109 has Der Ritter, a series of movies and comic books designed to promote Nazi German "hero" Ritter Germania by portraying him as a patriotic Super Soldier.

Literature

• In The Hunger Games, the rebels employ these to turn people against the Capitol.
• The Warhammer 40,000 universe has plenty of In-Universe examples within its Black Library novels.
  • The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer is a propaganda booklet for soldiers serving in the Imperial Guard. Unfortunately for them, much of the information is... outdated to say the least.
• The protagonist of Hench manipulates a journalist into writing a Propaganda Piece as part of her campaign to discredit the superhero who left her crippled. The article, despite being completely fact-checked, almost doesn't get published because it doesn't match the paper's Confirmation Bias.

Music

• Doctor Steel has various Public Service Announcements that focus heavily upon the power of imagination and of improving your general life. He is not only quite open about calling the propaganda he produces propaganda, he's skilled enough to get away with it, too; it helps that he's an Anti-Villain out to build a Utopian Playland where creativity and originality can thrive.

Real Life

General and Multimedia Examples

• Anti-digital piracy campaigns tend to fall under this, though they're usually counterproductive more often than not.
• During the 1920s, when alcohol was outlawed in the US, some wineries would sell grape juice in wine bottles - peeling off the label would reveal instructions on the back that the drinker wasn't supposed to follow in order to avoid turning to juice into wine.
• PETA is notorious for their pro-vegan ad campaigns, which are also considered to be by and large counterproductive, if not outright exploitative or bigoted in quite a few instances.
  • Cooking Mama, The Unauthorized PETA Edition shows Mama brutally killing and gruesomely preparing a turkey with cartoonish graphics. Game developer Raph Koster explains that his kids found it gleeful fun, and even Nintendo apparently found it amusing, given that their response was to have Cooking Mama herself put out a press release complaining about it.
• The Satanic Panic generated a wellspring of anti-Dungeons & Dragons propaganda, most of which would go on to age quite poorly.
• Astroturfing campaigns both online and offline are often a form of this, with online 'turfing usually employing Sock Puppet farms and the occasional real sympathetic volunteer.

Advertising

• The "Daisy" advertisement - it ran once in 1964 during that year's presidential campaign. Its use of propaganda techniques is credited with costing Goldwater the presidency and giving Lyndon B. Johnson a landslide victory.

Comic Books

• The biggest names in the modern comics industry largely got their start through their contributions to the American effort for World War II, which is touched on briefly here.
  • Captain America originated as a comic intended to rally support against the Nazis from a non-intervening America; the famous Issue #1 cover shows Cap in his iconic red-white-and-blue costume punching Adolf Hitler, and post-WWII he would be seen fighting Communists.
  • Superman himself is no stranger to this as well; some of the oldest well-known examples include Superman #18, World's Finest #8 and the infamous Action Comics #58. Note that all three of these covers double as advertising for war bonds and stamps to "fight" the Japanese with (though only the thread actually features a racist caricature of them). The Comics Detective site author Ken Quattro offers his take on Superman and his presence in America's political image here, and promotional booklets and signs are among some of the rarest Superman collectibles.
• Jack Chick's infamous Chick Tracts, free comics intended to disseminate the author's radical Christian views.
• Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism was released in 1947 to warn about communism.

Film

• Don't Be a Sucker has a Hungarian immigrant, who's a professor, speaks to an American man who was watching a gathering. The film was designed to warn viewers of the dangers of prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities and immigrants. The professor describes his experience living in Nazi Germany as an example of what happens if one too many fall for the propaganda.
• The short film Red Nightmare has a man named Jerry experience what the United States would be like under the Communist system. The film explains the dangers of communism, including the stripping of one's freedom.
• Both the original Sparkling Red Star (created in 1974) and its animated remake (2007) focuses on a young man named Pan Dongzi, who seeks to join the Red Army after witnessing the tyrannical landlord and his henchmen attack his village, killing Pan's mother in the process; the work is centered around painting communism in a positive light.
• Disney's Education for Death is a Wartime Cartoon that focuses on a young German boy named Hans and his upbringing in Nazi Germany. The film goes into details on Hans' "education", which is really indoctrination into the Nazi party and eventually life as a soldier.
• Super Size Me is Morgan Spurlock's documentary exposing the evils of junk food, and was meant to turn people against the fast food industry. It eventually became Counterproductive Propaganda as Spurlock's methods came under intense scrutiny - particularly the verifiability of his claims and the Fridge Logic of how a year-long diet consisting of food from a single restaurant would inevitably have adverse health effects.
• The Battle at Lake Changjin is a film allegedly about the 1950 Battle of the Chosin Reservoir during The Korean War. As one would expect from a film directly funded by the Chinese Communist Party as part of its 100th anniversary celebration about a conflict the Chinese forces performed remarkably poorly in, the depiction of events is blatantly counter-historic to the point of changing the battle's winner . Officially the movie is the highest grossing Chinese film ever, but international analysis is extremely skeptical of the legitimacy of official ticket sales numbers.
• Sound of Freedom is on the surface a biopic about a former US agent-turned-anti-pedophile activist Tim Ballard and his "Operation Underground Railroad" where he conducted anti-human trafficking operations in foreign countries, but progressive critics have accused it of both astroturfing (by way of inflating box office figures through a dubious referral scheme) and the film itself amounting to a QAnon equivalent of Birth of a Nation. Not helping matters was allegations of hypocrisy and skeletons in the cast and crew's closets: Eduardo Verastegui, one of the film's main actors and producers, was exposed as having rubbed elbows with notorious Pedophile Priest Marcial Maciel, and Tim Ballard himself garnered accusations about having allegedly amassed a collection of child sexual abuse material himself.
• Conversely, some especially on the conservative side of the fence accuse the 2023 satirical fantasy film Barbie of being an Anvilicious feminist propaganda piece. Some audiences, particularly in France and South Korea weren't as receptive as the rest of the world with the film's themes and message.

Literature

• Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in order to further abolitionism through showing the evils of slavery.
• Lolita was written with the intent of being a thorough condemnation of pedophilia, served in part by having the narrator be a pedophile trying desperately to justify his actions and clearly unable to stand himself - though it may have been just a bit too thorough, as seen by the fact that lolicon is now a commonly recognized "fandom".
• Discussed in Adolf Hitler's 1925 book Mein Kampf, where he mentions the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler believed this "Big Lie" was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and anti-Semitic political leader in the Weimar Republic. He, Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis would later use their own Big Lie to turn long-standing anti-Semitism into mass murder with the narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at an "international Jewry", which was blamed for World War I.
• The Aeneid was in part written to support the rule of Augustus, who had recently become the supreme power in Ancient Rome.

Live-Action TV

• The Hamas-sponsored children's talk show Tomorrow's Pioneers could be summed up as a twisted antisemitic, anti-Western, Islamist version of Sesame Street, advocating violence to impressionable Palestinian children. Not all Palestinian parents bought into it though, as some felt it was needlessly crossing the line in their struggle for independence from Israel.

New Media

• The page image depicting Garfield originated from a Tumblr post made in 2018. Created by Mark Vomit, it has undergone a Memetic Mutation and spawned many variants. Ironically, Markvomit would go on to be caught up in the NFT craze, which billed itself as "the definitive way of owning digital art" but in reality is a "pay to own a hyperlink associated with this image" deal.
• The realities of internet have led to a curious situation: it's very hard to block or actively counter propaganda, but at the same time, risk of backfire for the attacker is very high — most contemporary mass media platforms don't work well enough to avoid contempt even in the USA, and various attempts to implement "divide and conquer" policies (like Google's "this video is unavailable in your country" and Great Chinese Firewall) do more to annoy people than actually hiding anything from anyone who really wants to see it.
  • The winning strategy for many propagandists is simple and widespread: among those most hostile to you, find a handful of the most easily manipulated (and who doesn't have those kinds of people?), and give them as much exposure as you can.
• Parodied in this Something Awful thread of Digital Piracy mockup posters.
• TruthorFiction is a site dedicated to analyzing and debunking rumors on the Web in a similar vein to Snopes, but is a bit more thorough in their analysis (e.g. restoring assertions to their original context), and naturally has several posts discussing propaganda - including a set of posts written by contributor Brooke Binkowski on recognizing and combating propaganda.

Video Games

• Ethnic Cleansing is a notorious example of white supremacist propaganda. As one guessed, a player can choose a neo-Nazi, a Skinhead, or a Klansman to travel and kill non-white races such as Blacks, before going on to the Jews. Though its effectiveness as a propaganda game is tempered by the fact that it is also notoriously horrible from a graphical and gameplay standpoint. Though given the right-wing's use of ironic humour in the late 2010s and early 2020s, this may not be a bad thing to them either.
• Accusations of propaganda have been lobbed at the Call of Duty first-person shooter franchise more and more as newer entries are released - and with some of the more questionable decisions the series has made recently, it's a bit tough to argue against, such as the inclusion of former NRA president Oliver North (who gained notoriety in the 80s as one of those who took part in the Iran-Contra scandal, where they made a secret deal with Iran by selling munitions with them in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, with proceeds from the illegal weapons sale going towards funding the Contra right-wing anti-communist insurgency) both as a consultant and as a cameo appearance (as his younger self no less) in Black Ops II. The irony is not lost when North later went on to accuse video games of violence following the Sandy Hook shooting.
• Speaking of shooters, America's Army was designed from the onset as a recruitment tool for the US Army in the form of a first-person shooter video game, a medium most American youths are already familiar with.
• Similarly, the Hezbollah-sponsored Special Force (not to be confused with the online FPS of the same name, also going by the title Soldier Front in certain regions) was intended to portray Hezbollah insurgents as freedom fighters in their struggle against Israel.

Web Original

• The article Re-Visiting Russian Counter-Propaganda Methods by "The Saker" on The Unz Review explores the nature of propaganda in the modern age, with one of its cited examples being a CNN report that attempted to link Russian interference (commonly said to have an impact on the election of Donald Trump) to Tumblr, YouTube and... Pokemon Go?
  • One can imagine that CNN was a little too expectant that viewers would take them at their word - at least, the comments on the video seem to support the idea that such reports only serve to erode trust in American media.
  • The article uses the video itself to argue that the inverse has become true as well:

[…] if the Soviet went out of their way to prevent western propaganda from reaching the Soviet people, the Russians are nowadays doing the exact opposite: they are going out of their way to make sure that western propaganda is immediately translated and beamed into every single Russian household. What I propose to do today is to share with you a few recent examples of what Russian households are regularly exposed to. By now, you must have heard about the CNN report about how the evil Russkies used Pokemon to destabilize and subvert the US. [...]In Russia this report was in[sic] instant mega-success: the video was translated and rebroadcasted on every single TV channel. Margarita Simonian, the brilliant director of Russia Today, was asked during a live show “be truthful and confess – what is your relationship with Pokemon, do they work for you?” to which she replied “I feed them” – the audience burst in laughter.

Western Animation

• Winsor McCay made The Sinking of the Lusitania to get the USA to abandon its policy of isolationism at the beginning of World War I.

Other Media

• The iconic 1917 poster of Uncle Sam, a personification of the U.S. government. The poster was created by James Montgomery Flagg during World War I, with the text "I WANT YOU"; the image was inspired by a British recruitment poster showing Lord Kitchener in a similar pose, and was used to recruit for both World Wars. This poster would codify the modern appearance of Uncle Sam himself.
• Innocent, lovely and wholesome children in idyllic happiness, or else threatened by harm, are a popular subject and theme of propaganda images, as shown in these posters: Australian, British, German, American, Japanese, and French.
• This image of a 1950s PSA features Superman telling children not to disrespect their peers on the basis of race, religion or national origin, calling it "un-American". Five of the seven students that Superman is lecturing are white males, so it's obvious who the poster's message was aimed at.