Propaganda theory. Chapter 7
This part of my Propaganda textbook is about the most fundamental and dangerous distortion of reality - the history rewriting, that influences present public opinion but also shapes the future.
I start with the link list to the previous six chapters. In the beginning there was a theory lying under propaganda techniques, few approaches to content writing , strategy options and the tactical choices for public opinion control during crisis and universal methods that can be used quite effectively in many situations and for many purposes, doesn’t matter based on actual facts or on the staged performances or fake stories. Finally the last chapter was about tactical moves that help to reform or define the public opinion as it’s wanted.
All those approaches to manipulation with public thoughts and beliefs are temporary and in most cases can’t last for long unless they are fixed and even become inherited as a cultural and historical “knowledge” for generations of people. To that it’s enough to write or rewrite the history in the way that suits the contemporary agenda of the politicians or the brands owners. Yes, though “history” seems and is something fundamental, huge, larger than us, unchanged substance, it’s easily faked by people, because the very sense of learning of it is the matter of interpretation and precision of the facts. The farther it is the easier it can be manipulated but new times are as easily to be rewritten - it’s enough to fix the ongoing propaganda as real historical facts and their meanings without mentioning the whole spread of opinions, alternative fact lines and everything that historians use to work with when they reconstruct the past.
Storytelling
The most popular marketing and PR strategy, that is largely used in personal branding. And personal branding is everything these days. If before it was a matter of celebrities', public people’ and big brands’ promotion, today it’s sold to everyone who has a personal account on social media, who’s concerned about their job opportunities or personal independent income - from students to pensioners with passions in the craft. There are numerous books on the subject and experts on all the platforms. To make the long description short: it’s the way we or brand or whatever is presented to the world on an everyday basis - from retrospective and philosophic background to the latest events, visuals, statements.
We are what we show to the people around us. And we define our story of life by the image we want other people to see and recognise in us. So distortion of reality is inevitable. Either it's a subconscious subjective need to look better or worse than we are in reality or it’s a deliberately built illusion that has something or nothing in common with truth, depending on the mastermind behind the strategy. The most obvious example of such fake personality invention is the story of Anna Sorkin aka Anna Delvey.
And if in marketing or PR of the long serving projects it’s really important to stick as close to the actual state of things as possible, so the results of the campaigns will be stable and undeniable, then for short term effect that doesn’t matter. There’s a purpose and a shortest path to reach the target. Turn off the ethics and here we go - the new story is born - clean and 100% adapted to the needs of the storyteller. That’s what propaganda is usually about.
To achieve the desired vision it’s enough to project the wanted ideas on every message sent to the media, spread through social networks, through the trendsetters or opinion leaders, or published, that includes books, staged or screened and so on. The amount of the media resources involved into the campaigns depends on the scale of the illusion that should be invented and its projected life. So for big lies - the big scams, sorry, stories to be told. And the biggest of all is the state scale propaganda when ideology is involved.
The mechanisms laying under it are all the same as we’ve already discussed: the bigger the lie is the easier to believe in it, it’s enough to move the frame to more radical thinking to make the majority if not to believe in the new “norm” then to accept it silently, and simplification of the life shades leading to the black and white vision solves the problem of explanation. People follow the crowd and their fears, easily give up their high values for comfortable thinking of themselves as the right side of the story, especially if the story has a tiny contact with their private experience not even direct, but shared with someone respected as an authority in their circle.
For big adventures it’s important to project the near future as easily as they control the moment. And for that the fight for historical significance of their ideology becomes crucial. Ken Loach, an English film director and screenwriter, once said that it’s important to write the past by ourselves because those who do it control the present. Unfortunately not all of us are able to do so.
What is history? Let’s look at the example
If we take any textbook on history we will see that it’s just a book of stories about the past. So technically it’s a collection of narratives that were told by a storyteller. If there were many of them (like it was in the Ancient world), the book would represent a chaos of facts and their interpretations usually opposed to each other because each person had subjective views and purposes in mind. But if there’s just one mindset that ordered and filtered the “chapters” of it then in the end we’ll see a system with its logic of events, philosophy and moral conclusions.
Mentality and the principles behind interpretations of the historical facts, plus political agenda of the tellers - those are factors that generally define the past as it’s presented to us. For example, in the times of the Rzeczpospolita (1569—1795) - The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, formally known as the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and, after 1791, as the Commonwealth of Poland, the political doctrine was “the state is a republic under the presidency of the King”. Chancellor Jan Zamoyski said: “Rex regnat et non-gubernat”.
They had a parliament, the Sejm, as well as a Senat and an elected (and often invited) king functioned according to the “Golden Liberty” and some towns were adopted so-called Magdeburg rights. In the terms of that time elections were “national”, meaning that the king was elected by “people”. Sounds like a contemporary constitutional democracy, isn’t it? The British one nonetheless, and centuries before that one happened. There’s one very important detail: “people'' and “nation” were terms that addressed the szlachta - the Polish and Lethuanian nobles mostly. That was a minor proportion (8-10%) of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional population on very large territory included the contemporary Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, partly Russia, Latvia, Moldova, Estonia and Slovakia. Mostly conquered, sometimes married into.
But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? Now if we look into Wikipedia (the most popular and most unreliable source of the historical truth) we’ll see the difference in how the story of that time was told in different languages: Russian, Polish and English. And the most curious part is, of course, the subject of “Russia” because that’s where the roots of Polish-Russian political intolerance are to be found. While Polish and Russian versions mostly discussed the relationship between the neighbours and the political system, and the wars and borders, English text has mostly encyclopaedic formalities based on the details of the religion, policy, population structure, avoiding to use “Russia” or “Russian” until the final division of the territories between Russia, Prussia and Austria. That is impressive because the strategic decision to form the Rzeczpospolita was the result of the continuous wars between the Tsardom of Russia, Sweden, Denmark and both the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania over the old Livonia (Estonia and Latvia).
Speaking of border territories…
In 1240 Kiev was ruled by the Russian dynasty of Rurikovichi and was plundered and destroyed by the Mongol-Tatar army of Batu Khun who conquered the major part of the Kyiv Rus’ territories, including the future Grand Duchy of Moscow, so state was decomposed onto duchies. It continued to be ruled by the same dynasty with the permission of the conquerors until the victory of the Lithuanians in the battle of the Irpen River, which took place around 1324: the Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas completely defeated the army of the Grand Duke of Kiev Stanislav Ivanovich. In 1331, the Rurikovichi made their last attempt to seize the Kiev throne, but after the victory of the Lithuanian Prince Olgerd's troops in the battle of the Blue Waters in 1362, they finally lost the Kyiv.
From 1362 to 1569, Kiev was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from 1569 to 1654 - the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And that should have been a peaceful century though it wasn’t because of the forced “polonisation” of some occupied territories and permanent riots and wars. That’s the major factor that formed the Ukrainian language as we know it today, based on the west Ukrainian dialect that is close to the Polish language. The oppression was pretty cruel in some of the regions so in 1654 just another anti-Polish uprising took place in Kyiv - led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky who tried to form a kind of independent Ukraine fighting against Poland, and negotiating with Turks and Tatars, as well as with Russian tsar of the new dynasty - the Romanovs - who was a head of a considerably young state formed around Moscow after it gained independence from Tatar-Mongols in 1480 and almost lost it again to Poland in 1605—1613.
After the second try to get Russian help the agreement was made, the lands taken by Khmelnytsky passed "under the arm of the Moscow tsar", because that was the choice of the “people” led by him. Those “people” were Cossacks - one of the Ukrainian military “elite”. According to the terms of the Andrusovsky truce in 1667, Kyiv went under Russian protection, but later it was officially bought by the tsar for 146 thousand rubles, and Cossacks became one of the most respected divisions of the Russian army.
The version of the Cossacks and Polish szlachta relationships and Khmelnytsky’s portrait can be found in Henruk Sienkiewicz’s novel With Fire and Sword (1884) - the first part of his trilogy. The book was the last one adapted to the movie by Jerzy Hoffman in 1999 and lost its critical harshness to keep the romantic side of the story. The other two parts of the trilogy that were filmed in the 1970s (links in the end of the article).
Soon the Polish Commonwealth was divided. Poland that became part of the Russian Empire felt humiliated so nationalist’s movement till the Russian October Revolution after which it became independent. The same humiliation felt Germany after World War I. And being under the Soviet influence after World War II Poland wasn’t in the good place either... Though the USSR wasn’t the Russian Empire, and contemporary Russian Federation has little to do with both of the states, Moscow remains a face of the mortal enemy for some of the countries, as well as a reliable friend - for others thanks to the past, the memory and the propaganda.
Now, let’s add Ukrainian version
If we compare English, Polish, Russian (similar in the facts and neutrality of the descriptions, different in the details) and Ukrainian views published on Wikipedia about that particular moment of history we can see how radically different the latest version is - as in the choice of the words and the generalisation of the description. It ends with the “colonisation” of the Ukraine by the Russians while under the Polish reign the territories were prosperous, economically and politically developed, and Kyiv was a cultural and religious centre according to the text. The story then jumps to the anti-cemitic movements in the Russian Empire (in the 19th century) that were also the result of the Russian occupation because nothing like that even happened in Ukraine before. So the article is built on the moral that everything bad that happened was caused by Russians, while Kyiv was occupied, destroyed and oppressed exclusively by that nation.
Of course it’s not true. The autonomy that Kyiv under Khmelnitsky had and lost after his successor broke the agreement allowed him to continue his war against Poland behind Moscow’s back. But those are details unlike the anti-cemitic Ukrainian past that is the huge issue. It’s enough to check Israel version of the Polish-Jewish history of the time on the Wikipedia:
“Frequent revolts by Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants against the government and the tax burden always led to a wave of riots against the Jews, who were seen as representatives of the hated government by virtue of their preoccupation with money, operating leased lands, operating taverns and flour mills, and collecting taxes.
Among the most prominent in these events was the revolt of the Cossacks and peasants against Polish rule in 1648 - 1649 led by Bogdan Khmelnytsky. This revolt was accompanied by a series of pogroms of extraordinary magnitude and cruelty, known as the "Khmelnytsky riots," in which about a third of the Jewish communities in Poland and Ukraine were destroyed. The riots killed an estimated 100,000 Jews, raped tens of thousands of women and girls, and looted and destroyed much of their property, both private and communal (including Torah scrolls and relics). Jews captured by the Atmans were sold into slavery in the slave markets run by the Tatars in the estuary of the Kama River to the Volga. The composition of the Jewish scholar Nathan Neta Hanover, "Deep Greece" is perhaps the most important source for our knowledge of the 1648 riots”.
English and Polish texts tend to follow the Jewish version in numbers but according to the latest the most of the people murdered were fighting with Cossacks and Tatars during the riots. There were no Russian forces included in the battles because Russia agreed to support Khmelnitsky only in 1653. Russian version is very close to the English one.
We can see how different contemporary state policies influence the popularised historical interpretation and delivery of one very particular historical knot, when future Russian Empire was formed, united and strengthened in the conflict with the Rzeczpospolita, Sweden, Tatars and Mongols, and Ukraine in its turn, though had a chance to gain independence, couldn’t make it and chose the different path. And how difficult was the history of the jewish population in Europe when their shelter in Poland was lost for the same reasons as in the rest of Europe and how rage against the nationality was catalysed by the social inequalities and injustice, wars inside the state.
Non of those stories can be judged from the place where we are standing right now - those wars were bloody and merciless and the common people were not considered as people with rights, plus peasants weren’t free they belonged to the places and their owners. Jewish population was always separated from the other nationalities either by privileged position compared to the rest or by restrictions and denial of their civil rights. The were no war rules, the utter cruelty was a standard and the very sense of independence or loyalty was relative because the wars were as usual as winter season and all the conditions for the aristocracy were negotiable even in the case of defeat, and so on.
It is easy to make the troubled subjects the arguments for or against the political agenda today, to build a ground under the propaganda message and fix it in the media, online, in textbooks and scientific works, in films and on social platforms. The bigger the lie - the easier to believe it when the mind isn’t clear and emotions are boiling and the statement is accepted publicly by “majority”. It’s enough to twist and hide facts, details, the principal description of the lifestyle, beliefs, customs, social structure, relationships between different nationalities, religions, classes, take events out their contexts etc.
The long gone past became important for the present, so it can be turned upside down and used today like there’s nothing more significant than the history. Like it’s the main proof of something. The facts that existed on their own suddenly get contemporary moral context and conclusions that would never be made by people influenced on those events.
Cancel culture
Propaganda during the cancel culture is incredibly easy and effective. Never before the falsification of the past was so simple and the spread of the false facts, theories, “knowledge”, opinions and beliefs was so quick and wide. Fortunately also superficial, because with the opportunities our times produce limits. Too fast, too much, we are unable to consume and don’t have intentions or habit to choose, research and filter the information. The big data companies do that for us, inventing algorithms that predict our interests and views so the most compatible information can be delivered to us to keep us online, active and reacting.
I want to make another example of the latest propaganda results though it started as something truly important and needed - the antiracist movement in the USA. There’s a war declared on the Western history, that includes all the areas - from the street names, the art museums’ exposition reordering to social media posts or even contemporary designers’, stylists’ or makeup artists’ works. It’s literally everywhere poisoning and paralysing creativity and human communication at some point.
The eagerness with which society is ready to cancel and deny the history is frightening, it’s aggressive like the sides are still at war. At the same time the present only gets uglier and unlike history it doesn’t have excuses of old moral system and mentality of the past. Today is what we make of it.
It doesn’t matter if we talk about the Ukrainians changing their streets names excluding deliberately their own Russia connected past or about white Americans and British or Australians or Canadians who fight with the colonial monuments, historical characters and art, everything from the history, just to show that they are sorry for something that was done, changed and paid for centuries ago. Cancelling a part of history it’s impossible to make sense of the rest of it, because everything that we consider “bad” today existed and happened with the participation of the “good”. Old morality and standards can't be denied only by our will to rewrite them. They existed for a reason, they were changed and now there are generations that don’t remember the past but they are defined by it.
So when contemporary propaganda tries to “fix” the old “bugs” altogether and massively it simply distorts the present and leaves people without their background, their sureness, their sense of the right and wrong. It adds doubts, radicalises society, and most importantly doesn’t leave the path to the resolution. It’s simply impossible to change the past. Superficially we can forget some episodes, reevaluate the significance of one thing or another, but the present will stay - racism, chauvinism, homofobia, all sorts of intolerances. In reality they will get more fuel, because all of them are rooted in personal insufficiency and anxiety in the dark time. It’s a reaction to depression - cultural, economical, individual - when most people tend to look for the enemies outside rather than work on their own life and perspectives. It’s simply easier.
That mechanism and those movements can be used by different political or economical forces for their profit. It’s easy, but with such spread of the information and such speed of delivery and its reproduction with further distortion the process becomes uncontrollable. The cultural impact of the smallest ideological provocation can be enormous. We saw it with the BLM and LGBTQ+ movements explosion in 2020 and the following presidential campaign in the USA, its result that almost ended with a recoup because of the immobilisation of the crowds. Propaganda that is based on the fight with evil for the greater good is always used to divide the society and to form the active centre that immobilise people that are usually quiet and rather indifferent to the politics. And unlike the action and reaction caused by one problem, that social feedback is messy. It’s about everything at once, just like social media of any activist.
The problem is after the results are achieved by the campaign designers it’s impossible to neutralise them fast enough so the politicians should deliver the promises otherwise the popularity of the winners will fade pretty quickly. Fascists were serious about their vision to change the future according to the history they wrote based on their ideology. What is with contemporary leaders? Are they able to play the same game with us? Or will it be powerful technological companies? At the moment we can’t see the order behind the chaotic events, but what if there’s something?
The history rewriting today is needed to show how important it is to control each one of us - calculating our personal carbon footprints, spendings, credits, opinions, behaviour, health conditions, family intentions and so on. We are permanently reminded of our faults as irresponsible human beings. So in case if we misbehave, it’ll be easier to fix one person without dealing with the whole society. Centralised control over our identities, finances and perspectives is a way to surgical manipulation with the rebels - the dangerous elements that can think independently, lead the people, insist on things. Cutting our rights, that includes the right to the opinion and freedom of speech (now it’s called “disinformation” or “misinformation” only because it doesn’t fit the acceptable frame on the subject), is a first and the major step to manageable democracy that has little to do with actual democracy. Cancel culture is a perfect mechanism for that. It stimulates self-censorship, that means it has a mechanism of self-regulation which is priceless. Such exists usually in totalitarian states and based on the experience and fear of oppression.
“As long as we realise that we are interpreting events according to our beliefs and feelings, and not claiming our viewpoint as absolute truth, we continue in the long, healthy line of interpreters of events. Once we claim that what we have discovered is the pure truth, however, we are in trouble. Democracies are living bodies that allow for disagreement - even as to our lineage. Autocracies and Theocracies do not”, - I cite Richard Friedlander’s words as an advice and the good practice to check the articles or opinions we get in touch with for falsification of the facts and the conclusions made for you by their authors.
Films about the history of the Polish Commonwealth based on the second and the third books of the trilogy by Henruk Sienkiewicz. The Deluge (1974) (was among the Oscar nominees) and Colonel Wolodyjowski (1969) by Jerzy Hoffman.
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