The Art of Propaganda

By Commander Lincoln Rockwell


If each of the men in the fable about the blind men and the elephant were required to construct a model of an elephant, there would be three very different models. The blind man who felt only the tail would build a model as he described an elephant in the fable -- as "a sort of rope." The blind man who felt the leg and said an elephant was like a tree would produce a tree-like "elephant," while the man who felt only the trunk would construct his "elephant" like a snake.

Most men I have met in politics consider themselves automatically experts in the field of propaganda. But almost all of them make the same type of basic error in their propaganda as did the blind men in describing and reconstructing an elephant; both suffer from insufficient experience with the subject. A right-wing businessman, when he gets sick, doesn't try to doctor himself, nor does he try to practice law himself, nor does he even try to do his own advertising. He hires professional experts to do these highly technical jobs for him. But when that same right-wing businessman wants to move the people of a whole nation to an understanding of our national peril, he doesn't hesitate to spend relatively huge sums trying to write and produce his own amateur propaganda. In almost every case he produces propaganda which he likes, completely forgetting in his political excitement that the art of propaganda (and advertising) is not in producing that which one likes and admires one's self, but that which will produce the effect desired -- sales in the case of advertising and political conviction in the case of propaganda. Because he is able to think, he presumes that his audience is also able to think & thorn; a completely unwarranted assumption. Because he himself is repelled by crudeness and exaggeration, he makes his pitch factual, logical, and usually subtle. In addition to this foolishness, he also forgets that the average man in the street is emotionally assaulted during all his waking hours by advertising brilliantly designed by experts to capture attention through the most powerful kind of psychological impact. The average right wing piece, crowded onto a page, verbose, and dull, is not only not able to win the attention of the average man amid all this competition, but positively repels him.

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