From the “Blut und Boden” war cry of the Nazi nationalist party during World War II, to the recent information bombardment of Dabiq and Rumiyah both as extremist magazines serving terrorist organizations such as ISIS and ISIL, linguistic propaganda and its influences are almost as ubiquitous as language itself. Propaganda is a form of communication that is often misleading and untrue, but used to advance a particular political cause or to persuade a certain group of people. Linguistic propaganda specifically, is propaganda oriented towards the use of language to persuade the audiences. The danger lies within how effective these methods can be: linguistic propaganda always served to create fear, confusion, hate and overwhelm the public’s sense of judgment during times of crises.
Linguistic propaganda has existed for as long as there was a need to assemble a collective force. In WWI and WWII, popular slogans and other catchy poems, songs created for the purpose of mobilizing the homefront for war succeeded in not only increased domestic output, but also social hostility towards citizens belonging to the enemy belligerents. An example exists within a famous anti-German propaganda published in the fever of WWI, when a poster depicts the nation as a hulking monster holding a bloodied club and a helpless woman, with the slogan “Destroy This Mad Brute”. This quickly became the face of WWI war propaganda and elicited a wave of antagonization towards German-American immigrants (Natale, 7). The derogatory language pertaining to the mentality of most Americans at the time successfully rallied a large crowd which focused their attention on persecuting the belligerents and mobilizing their productions. Similarly, another instance of propaganda-induced fever lead Americans on a crusade against the subversive communism and contributed to the second Red Scare. The American news coverage of the political progress of USSR’s communist party “systematically highlights the negative aspects of the Soviet domestic system while obscuring the positive ones”. One newspaper source even described the Soviet Union as “regime of mafioso types” whose residents hold “pathological beliefs” (Tactics of Terrorists, 60). While the article came from Wall Street Journal and most likely represented the traditional capitalist resentment towards radical reform efforts by the Soviet leaders, it still encompassed a large scope of its popular view during that time. While in times of peace and necessity the Soviet Union was regarded as an ally to the US (such as during WWII, when Franklin D Roosevelt established a personal relationship with Joseph Stalin), news reports like the aforementioned ones accelerated the fallout between US and Soviet Union. The second crusade against communism began domestically when raids were conducted on the basis of Russian espionage, and when devout followers of McCarthyism began to persecute government officials for any affiliation with the supposed enemy. Propaganda has the ability to mobilize large groups of people to the extent of overturning countries, as evident by these historical events.
However, focusing on the extremist aspect of propaganda, it works best in a volatile environment filled with anxiety and hate. Propaganda’s malevolent connotation not only comes with its falsehoods and multiple exaggerations, but also from the hatred, anger, fear and confusion it so heavily relies on. In light of the recent terrorist attacks associated with Islamic extremists, they have had significant activity on the Internet, a new and powerful resource that amplified the terrorists’ sphere of influence. ISIS’s use of social media created a barrage of hateful messages, online magazines like Rumiyah and Dabiq are targeted towards devout religious fanatics as well as the younger generation containing anti-Christian, anti-Jew and anti-Shia ideologies. Claims such as “The whole world will be an Islamic state” and “even the Vatican will be Muslim” are intended to threaten and horrify western audiences with religious affiliations and opinions towards the Muslims (Steinbuch, 8). These claims create fear and confusion among its audiences, and by social media great amount of publicity is guaranteed, leading to domestic insurrection and chaos akin to that experienced by Americans during the Red Scare.
One of the most important aspects of linguistic propaganda is thought-control. Without the individual ability to critique and logically examine the speaker’s argument, the audience will be lost in a hailstorm of fallacies which render all reasoning devices useless. A stunning prophecy foretold by English writer George Orwell predicted the nature of word altercation for political goals in his dystopian novel 1984, in which sensitive words are replaced with synonyms to lessen their connotative meanings, and unlikable concepts are erased from the public’s vocabulary. Words such as “orthodoxy” are replaced with “goodthinks”, and thus forced-labour camps become “joy camps” and any subversive thought becomes “crimethinks” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 16). These vocabularies help ease the sentiments and direct individuals to think in the direction the government wants them to. Because thoughts and concepts are directly related to the set of phonetic sounds and linguistic symbols associated with them, by changing these phonetic sounds and the arrangement of the letters (or even a slight change in sentence structure) can force the person to think about the same thing differently. This is a very powerful tool that would allow extremist ideas to perpetuate through large groups of people, simply by putting subjects in a different way. Similarly observed in Russian politics, the predictions of Orwell seemed to be coming into reality as new words replaced old political expressions that were deemed sensitive. The new words such as “раскулачивание” ---- dekulakization instead of the persecution, deportation and execution of prosperous Russian peasants during the Soviet repression campaigns; “Коллективизация” ---- collectivization for the consolidation and forced integration of individual property and the devastating famine that soon followed (Thody, 2). These new terms erase the feeling of destitute and persecution commonly associated with political repression and replace it with a feeling of progress.
Propaganda relies on misinformation and familiarity of a certain concept in order to win acceptance into the conscious thoughts of the public, thus one of the effects of linguistic propaganda is an inherently false perception of real world events and an extremely limited stream of information. Joseph Goebbels, the head propagandist of Hitler’s Third Reich, knew this better than anyone. Named “Father of Lies” by his opponents, Goebbels relied on blockade of information and described Churchill as “a drunk” and Franklin D Roosevelt as “Jewish” (Joseph Goebbels, 14). These untrue words and blatant accusations serve to rivet the emotions of the German public. When Nazi-oriented newspapers was the public’s only source of information, many are more likely to buy into Goebbels’s falsehoods. Specific targeting languages that include ad hominem and radicalising opponents both serve to elicit hate and anger from the public. The result was an altered generation’s twisted view of the world around them: fanatic devotion to the fascist cause and even diligent domestic mobilisation of the working forces to contribute to Germany’s war efforts. The goal isn’t to control information but rather to use that limited information to create illusions which would sway the audience. The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre that took place under the orders of Chairman Ping lead to one of the bloodiest conclusions of student protest in modern history, however, the original purpose of the student demonstration is very much obscured due to the altered nature of all existing records. While the official government statement regarding the students explained “Their goal is to establish a totally Western-dependent bourgeois republic”. (Deng, 8). Words such as “totally” and “bourgeois” eliminated any room for doubt and questioning so that the ideology of student protestors seemed radically dangerous at the time. By controlling such wording and using his governmental authorisation to completely obliviate all evidences of the massacre, Deng successfully wiped away a traumatic memory from Chinese modern history.
In conclusion, the use of linguistic propaganda has dictated the minds of many throughout decades, even in times when what it promoted seemed insane and fanatical. Linguistic propaganda is the abuse of language and information that creates fear, confusion, anger, hate and intents to point that destructive towards its foe. It causes social unrest and riots in the streets, it brings paranoia and chaos to the heart of civilization and changes how people perceive the world like moulding clay. It is a dangerous and insatiable power that one must carefully avoid. Words are potent harms that can result in catastrophe, after all.
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Image source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1289-x