by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
In the beginning, there was the word. And when addressing propaganda, the word was either persuade or coerce. This is the essential nature of propaganda: to change (or re-enforce if you are already sympathetic) your mind on a particular issue. As the first article showed, the most basic tool of propaganda is connotation/implication. Before venturing into the depths of the lingua tactical of propaganda, I thought it might be useful to illustrate some non-verbal and indirect methods of propaganda.
First we must realize that propaganda is the cultivation of an image. An image that relies upon idea(s) the speaker wants associated with certain people, organizations or actions. To that end, propaganda is essentially image control: seeking to create mental associations in the viewer be they emotional or rational and spreading that image/association through out a given populace. Keep in mind that literacy was for the bulk of human history limited to specialists such as scribes and/or the upper class who could afford education.
Very few people in the ancient world could read, but most of them could see. What better way to communicate the power of those who run a society to those who cannot read than by using a non-verbal symbol to send a message? Perhaps a symbol like a great building or monument. Something that says “we’re here, this is what we are about, this is our place and look what we can do” to the great unlearned masses. This form of propaganda is also as old as civilization. You could argue that it is older than modern civilization, stretching back to the late Neolithic period.
Consider Göbekli Tepe, a set of Neolithic religious structures located in what is now southeastern Turkey. At approximately 12,000 years old, Göbekli Tepe predates Egyptian culture by five or six thousand years. But is it propaganda? Let’s examine the basic criteria of propaganda as applied to this structure to see if it qualifies.
Does it send a message? Yes. In its most basic form, it is a statement of religious ideology. At the deepest levels of the sites, many of the upright pillars are decorated with the nature based symbolics commonly found at Neolithic religious sites such as lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles and other predator and prey species. You can even see the message change over time as their religion changed. Moving up through the layers of the dig, newer decorations include human figures. As an aside, many archaeologists place considerable significance on this change in message taking it to mark the transition from a culture where nature inclusive of man is worshiped to a system of belief where man is elevated above nature.
Is it designed for public consumption? Yes. All the evidence points to Göbekli Tepe being a religious retreat. Being the only stone structure for many miles around at the time, I think it is safe to assume that it was not only known to the locals but to nomads and pilgrims of like minded worship.
Is the message one of persuasion and/or coercion? Yes. It can be interpreted as both. As persuasion, it is a statement of the ideals of their religion and the basic value of worshiping as the builders of Göbekli Tepe worshiped. As coercion, it was a statement of the power of their faith that they could build a massive structure from stone at a time when most people were either nomadic or living in small hunter/gatherer villages. To provide a bit of context, Göbekli Tepe predates the invention of pottery, metallurgy, writing and the wheel. The complex also predates the Neolithic Revolution when archaeologists start seeing the beginnings of agriculture and animal husbandry. Look what we can do and what we’re about, indeed.
The Egyptians took this idea of buildings as propaganda to a whole new level. The scale of their building remains one of the great wonders of the world. The temples, pyramids and palaces they built were not just statements of faith or housing for the Pharaohs. They were projections of power for the ruling dynasties, often run as great public works projects to bolster the ancient Egyptian economy and as statements to the greatness of the Pharaohs. The ruling class went to great strides to out do one another as well. This trend of using architecture as a form of propaganda stretches back to the very beginning of the Egyptian dynasties.
In the 3rd Dynasty, the first of the pyramids were built by the Pharaoh Djoser and his commoner architect Imhotep. Until that time, all of the Pharaohs had been buried in mastabas – rectangular flat roofed stone buildings. Imhotep’s innovation was to stack six mastabas of ever decreasing size to create the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, a royal burial complex to the northwest of the then Egyptian capitol of Memphis. This started a competition among the subsequent Pharaohs as to who could build the most impressive burial sites. They saw this as not only fulfilling their religious obligations, but as statements of personal power, each trying to make a greater statement to history about the glory of their rule. This practice pyramid building reaches a nadir with the 4th Dynasty Pharaoh Khufu building the Great Pyramid at Giza, the plateau used as a royal burial complex just outside of Cairo which was used in conjunction with the Valley of the Kings by the later dynasties.
However impressive the Great Pyramid is, the practice of building to project imperial power reached its full potential with the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II. Instead of trying to compete for sheer size to send his message against the rather imposing legacy of Khufu, Ramses went for volume. He built a lot, by far more than any other Pharaoh, and he even took credit for buildings he didn’t build by literally having his mark carved on them. To give him credit, many of these buildings he co-opted for his greater glory Ramses was indeed responsible for massive additions to and an upgrades on.
In addition to his large burial complex, the Ramessuem at Thebes, Ramses is credited with building numerous temples, monuments and even entire cities. The city of Pi-Ramesses was built to replace the capitol at Thebes. He is also credited with building a lavish tomb for his favored consort, Nefertari, and the temple complex at Abu Simbel which was an act of pure ego carved into the living stone of two mountains in southern Egypt.
Did these buildings send a message? Yes. The Pharaohs are Living Gods and their power over Egypt is absolute. Were they designed for public consumption? Without a doubt. Is the message one of persuasion and/or coercion? Yes. Look up at the great works of the Pharaohs in awe and despair for you will never be their equal. Unless you’re really special. Like the man who started the Egyptian architectural tradition, Imhotep. It should be noted that the man “who made all of this possible” was one of the few commoners in ancient Egyptian history to be accorded the status of godhood upon his death.
The Greeks were also great builders, but none of their buildings says propaganda quite like the Parthenon. Built nominally as a temple to the goddess Athena, the patron of the city-state of Athens, the Parthenon is located on the Athenian Acropolis – a rocky outcropping that dominates the skyline of Athens. I say nominally built as a temple because the evidence tends to point to the fact that it was never really used as a temple by any given sect let alone the cult of Athena Polias (which was the official cult of Athena as patron of Athens). In addition to serving as a display case for the massive statue of Athena crafted by Phidias, the Parthenon served primarily as a treasury. Does this building send a message? Yes. We are Athens and look to our glory. Was it designed for public consumption? Being on the most visually prominent spot in all of Athens in addition to being the largest Greek building of its time, the answer can only be a resounding yes. Is the message one of persuasion and/or coercion? Also a resounding yes as the building is a testament to both the glory of the Athenian patron goddess and the economic power of Athens.
Rome specifically and with great forethought used buildings as propaganda, especially in the provinces. It was, in fact, a key element in the projection of Roman power. Everywhere the Romans went, two things were sure to follow: stone roads and buildings. Think of the messages the provinces got when Rome built coliseums, market complexes, government buildings, military fortifications and aqueducts. Even in Gaul, modern France, where there was a sophisticated network of wooden roads built by the local Celts, Rome conquered and then Rome built and they built in stone. Europe is littered with the ruins of the projection of Roman power. In South Shields, England at Tyne & Wear, the Roman fort of Arbeia stands today (partially restored) as testament to how far Rome could project her power. Most of the provinces were the home of timber and thatch construction. The stone buildings of the Romans were sending a message that “Rome is here, get used to it, and we can build crazy things you can’t, by they way did you notice our well-organized professional military that came with them”. They were not only functional, but aimed to make an impression on the locals. The message was clearly a mix of both persuasion (look at the lovely bathhouse!) and coercion (nice fort you’ve got there).
Just so, consider the monuments and public buildings of the modern United States. The Capitol building was partially burned by the British on August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812. To shore up confidence at home and to tell those Brits who was in charge here, the Capitol was not only reconstructed but expanded in the period from 1819 to 1826. Look at the style of construction of the Supreme Court and Congress. The Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, they are all monuments to men who left their mark on history certainly, but what else do they say? Are they not projections of power and creating the image of a society as great as that of the Romans and Greeks whose architecture and scale they mimic?
There are clearly more ways to send a message than words alone.
What do you think?
Kudos to commentator Darren Smith for tangentially suggesting this supplemental topic.
~ submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
The Propaganda Series;
Propaganda 105: How to Spot a Liar
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Streisand Effect and the Political Question
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Sound of Silence
Propaganda 104: Magica Verba Est Scientia Et Ars Es
Propaganda 103: The Word Changes, The Word Remains The Same
Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Holly Would “Zero Dark Thirty”
Propaganda 102: Holly Would and the Power of Images
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Child’s Play
Propaganda 101: What You Need to Know and Why or . . .
Related articles of interest;
Gene H:
“It obviously does in your opinion since it clearly represents an idea – responsible reasonable usage of natural resources – that you find abhorrent to your goals of maximized personal profits, Bron.”
Well, in the grand scheme of things I would rather be for maximizing profits than supporting the killing of 6,000,000,000 [6 billion] people and forcing the remaining 500,000,000 to selectively breed like cattle to produce a “master” race.
But like everything else socialists schemers plan and implement, we would end up with 10 billion people who were dumb as bricks.
As I said above the philosophy behind the Georgia Guide Stones is evil and the stones should be destroyed and used to filter shit.
Gene, I agree with the notion of mothballing the shuttles is probably a bad idea for the moment, but as we have seen, the aging space shuttles are not as safe as we would like. I think Burt Rutan’s design for a “shuttlecock” configuration as a reentry vehicle is brilliant, and probably a vision of what future space shuttles might look like. I don’t have any particular beef with using the Russian space shuttle, since it is similar to our fleet and apparently has an excellent reliability record, but that cannot go on forever. Thing about Rutan’s design is that it is going to take NASA and the government to provide enough money to build one big enough that it can actually be useful in the space program.
The buildings are just as strong or in some cases as wrong as the people that run them…..
As for propaganda,
” Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”
Phillip K dick
http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm
Gene,
The stones say keep the population under 500 million. Considering that would mean wiping out the 6 and a half billion people in the way of your shining city on the hill, you’d better get started.
Oh and Id love to hear you elaborate on “guiding reproduction”. Please go on.
Gene H.- I agree, actually, I was more referring to the initial development of the program rather than the current use. I don’t believe anyone thinks that some privatization is entirely bad when the alternative might be a hiatus on developing space tech, but the government should and must continue to spur the main event. There are reports of a Dutch company selling one way tickets to Mars, at least in theory. If I only had a few million bucks :*( And yeah, Hawkins pretty much nailed it. Not enough resources in the solar system for construction of Dyson’s sphere, and Earth’s resources will not permit an ever growing population- I don’t think anyone can accuratley predict the actual ceiling, but we’ve already hit diminishing returns on resource extraction. It won’t be that many more generations between now and massive depopulation, through catastrophe or choice. Hopefully choice (limited reproduction- none of O.S. Card’s Thirds, while I’m on a scifi kick) but I doubt it. It’s how we rebuild from that event that will determine whether we eventually die out completley as a species.
Woosty, the Wolf of Gubbio story?
(I may get some of the facts mangled, not much of a scholar of Christian parables or such)
In a little village (Gubbio) a wolf had been raiding night after night and eating their kids and so forth. They tried to catch him and kill him but failed. Finally they ran and fetched St. Francis who was reported to be able to speak with the animals; they wanted to send him into the woods to find the wolf and convince him not to keep raiding. He said to them, “I don’t need to go find your wolf to speak with him; I can speak with YOU. What you need to do is FEED YOUR WOLF. Then he won’t devour any of your kids.”
So they took turns leaving food out for the wolf and he came in every night and had dinner and then left peaceably.
I forgot what this has to do with the Propaganda by Buildings, sorry. 😉
Woosty,
I’m not much of Jungian but I’ll give it a shot.
Jung had a lot of theologians in his family and was well versed in the science of religion. He did suggest that the historical Jesus was lost in the myth of Christ. He did try to help his clients reconnect with their lost sense of God through their own myths and dreams (the neglected aspects of our being compensated) and was fairly successful at doing what the church had failed to do … the dogmatism of Christianity being at fault.
In the version of the sermon I know, the wolf was trying to protect the child and had the hunter been able to see the situation through the eyes of the wolf, murder would not have been done.
Zacchaeus, a short man, climbed the tree to see Jesus since he couldn’t see him due to the crowd ( I’m using Luke 19 here). “What you see [in life] depends on where you stand; what you hear depends on who you listen to.” Two lessons (one spiritual, one practical) … move out of the dogma of the church and climb a tree if you want to see Jesus, and/or, try to see things through the eyes of others before passing judgement on their actions.
Spirituality and sex are always intertwined, in my opinion. They are fundamental urges within each human being. Check out the stories about almost any religious mystic … a very randy bunch. Jung seemed to understand that.
OS,
Don’t get me wrong. I think there is a role for private enterprise to play and Rutan’s group is a fine example, but the abdication of basics like mothballing the Shuttle fleet and putting our entire NASA reliance upon the Russians and private companies? Bad idea.
The irony of history has a way of dispensing with arrogant architectural propaganda. I believe that French artillery crews in Egypt used the great Sphinx for target practice and shot off its nose.
Gene, speaking of high ground. Back in WW-I, smart young officers realized it made more sense to go charging around the sky at about two miles a minute rather than slogging through muddy trenches at walking speed. Despite the trade off that a pilot had a life expectancy of four weeks, it was better than the alternative of staying on the ground in the trenches.
OT, but I had the great pleasure of meeting the last living fighter pilot from WW-I. Otto Roosen flew for Germany, and was 99 years old when I met him in 1992.
High is better than ground pounding any day of the week, risks be damned.
With regard to privatization, there is absolutely nothing keeping basement geniuses from inventing. Burt Rutan is a prime example of such an individual genius. But full development of his ideas will probably depend on NASA and/or the Air Force.
MM,
I saw that Terry Jones documentary. Also the series he did on “The Barbarians”. Good stuff.
*********
CLH,
Don’t forget the very real tactical military advantage of space. Higher ground is always of importance strategically and tactically. That’s one of the reason I think the attempts to starve NASA and privatize space is a really bad idea. Also I’m in the Hawking camp: the only long term survival solution for our species is to spread to through the solar system and beyond. I’d rather that be a government endeavor than to find our next home be on Planet Starbucks in the Microsoft Galaxy.
As propaganda goes I have always liked Trajan’s Column, just the thing a new Emperor (and accomplished general) would build for himself to show to all his exploits and power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Column
So Blouise, if Jung is correct that when a patient presents a sexual issue, it’s usually actually a religious issue. When a patient presents a religious issue, it’s a matter of their sexuality. What do you suppose that wolf was really up to?
Blouise it was exactly (almost) that!. Inspired, anyway, by that sermon.
Great food for thought and a few good laffs as well….(especially the part where the wolf said he only ate Gramma to spare the child…. 😉
…and the hunters response was SOOOOOOO knee jerk…. 😉
Back in 1983, some of us volunteer parents attended a week-long soccer coaching clinic at Vandenburg AFB just north of Santa Barbara. After spending all day on the fields, we would gather after dinner for films and lectures in an auditorium normally used by air force officers for their training programs. Along one wall stood a line of GIANT MENACING OLIVE GREEN SOVIET MISSILES, while along the opposite wall there stood some pathetic little blue and white American missiles. I found myself wondering: “Are American Air Force officers so stupid that this kind of heavy-handed symbolic propaganda doesn’t offend them?”
Woosty,
Sheep’s clothing?
Seriously, if it was a sermon about the wolf trying to help the child but the hunter, not knowing that, shot him dead, originally by Forrest Church, a Unitarian minister … then it is one of my favorites.
It’s often coupled with a reading from the Gospel of Luke.
In my loverly anti-dogma church todays sermon was about the propaganda of wolves. It was the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ story from the wolfs perspective…
I thought of y’all….. 🙂
Terry Jones (of the Monte Python troupe) produced a series of History Channel videos on The Crusades wherein he noted the use of stained glass windows in church cathedrals as propaganda inculcating within the illiterate faithful lurid lies about non-existent persecution of Christians by the Muslim inhabitants of “the Holy Land.” Jones called the stained glass propaganda windows “the medieval equivalent of tabloid journalism.”