Bingul Propaganda Decoded

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64690-637-6
Verlag: Grand Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 102 Seiten

Nothing less than our democracy is at stake. Hate, anger, fake news, and alleged conspiracies: Our debate culture is in a state of emergency, and polarization has become a central phenomenon in our society. In this insightful wake-up call, reporter Birand Bingül argues that this is part of a propaganda strategy that seeks to collapse our social dialogue. With historic context as well as examples from present-day politicians, Bingul provides thorough, structured insight into the various elements that make propaganda so effective, even in a time when information and facts are at everyone's fingertips. A deep analysis into how propaganda and populism works, with helpful and hopeful ways to counter these strategies.

Birand Bingül received a degree in journalism with a mi-nor in American Studies at the University of Dortmund. As a reporter, he has worked for the German station Tagesschau and also served as deputy corporate spokesman of the net-work WDR and as head of communications of the network ARD. He is currently managing director of the media com-pany fischerAppelt, advisors. Bingül is the author of several books.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bingul, Birand

Weitere Mitwirkende

Latsch, Oliver

Leseproben

Chapter 2 Roots: The Political Idea of Propaganda

It is thought that propaganda begins with the invention of a new political idea. As self-evident, even banal, as this may sound, it is not so. After all, not just any idea will do. It has to be an extraordinary idea.

Parties usually represent specific social interests. That is where they have their roots. From those interests, they draw their values and their base. In Germany, the CDU represents the conservative middle class, and the FDP represents businesses and freelancers. With its convictions, a new party usually seeks to fill a gap in the party spectrum and uplift a particular interest that seems unoccupied or neglected and promising. The merger of the East German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the West German Electoral Alternative Work and Social Justice (WASG), for example, occupied the gap to the left of the Social Democrats—and so the new party logically called itself the Left (Die Linke). Classic party-political positioning.

Propaganda parties act differently right from the start. Their idea has to be propagandistically useful, and Hitler was already very aware of this. In his eyes, the new political idea had to have the potential to electrify the masses and maximize his power. Gaining power was the goal to which everything had to be subservient. A political idea that did not promote this goal was useless. Without a political idea, propaganda, in turn, had no direction and no purpose.

In summary, the first decision is to become a propaganda party; the next step is to have an idea that can be used for propaganda purposes, followed by propaganda itself. The idea and propaganda are intertwined and mutually dependent.

Suppose a new movement looks for interests to represent according to classical party logic. This has far-reaching consequences: such a movement will represent a social group—but has to oppose all others. For example, in the Weimar Republic, the nationalists had the liberals and the communists against them, as well as other competing nationalists. In this crowded spectrum, anyone who tried to unite as many voters as possible would have limited themselves enormously by concentrating on one social group.

The journalist and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer was already impressively precise about this in the mid-1930s. In “Totalitarian Propaganda,” Kracauer explains Hitler’s approach: “He cannot have the intention of making himself the party of some one-sided interests and thus of making National Socialism a party alongside the others.”[9] The political cake had already been divided. Only niches remained. Thus, if one aimed for absolute power like Hitler, special interest politics were utterly counterproductive, no matter the cost. Interest politics would be a trap, a dead end. Thus, it was clear, Kracauer wrote of Hitler, “that what mattered to him was not the defense of interests but the influencing of the masses, regardless of their interests.”[10]

In the logic of a propaganda party, Hitler could not and did not want to place himself in the existing party spectrum with his new idea under any circumstances—as it would be just one of many. He had to put himself the existing party system. Or at least apart from it. In Hannah Arendt’s words, he had to be “in principle outside the party system.”[11] The idea had to be constructed more extensively than all existing ones. It was not allowed to lean on a single social interest and narrow itself ideologically. Only if it strictly refrained from doing so could it be attractive to supporters of all other parties.

Thus, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party pretended to unite the divisive political currents within itself. This idea placed the Nazis—initially and for a while only in theory—above their competitors, whose struggle between right and left, above and below, suddenly seemed petty. Regarding ideas, the Nazis hovered above the pettiness of the “normal” party system. They brought “a synthesis to the marketplace of words that promised national unity,” as Hannah Arendt put it.[12]

Promising national unity above all particular interests, class antagonisms, or revolutionary enmities, as an insistent counterpoint, as it were, was how Hitler translated the primary approach of a propaganda party into reality: in defiance of the recent loss of the First World War, the collapse of the empire, and the ideological and physical clash of the old nationalism with burgeoning socialism.

The idea also had to respond to an economic, social, or cultural crisis—real or imagined—to give it a high degree of urgency. In addition, the idea absolutely had to be connectable to society, to the masses, to actual conditions, and to as large a part of the collective memory and emotional state as possible. The new was not allowed to be new. That would be too foreign, equivalent to overstraining, and would not bring the desired connection to the masses. This compelling propagandistic principle of connectivity made Hitler draw on the past.

Hitler wrote in about the extraordinary role of propaganda concerning the political idea. Propaganda would have to “tirelessly see that an idea wins adherents.” It should make them “inclined” to the movement. “Propaganda works the whole in the spirit of an idea and makes it ripe for the time when that idea will be victorious.” It should “draw people across” or “make them insecure in their previous convictions.” The task of propaganda was “the destruction of the existing state of affairs and the infiltration of this state of affairs with the new doctrine.”[13]

Joseph Goebbels—after-1930 official propaganda chief of the NSDAP and later minister of propaganda—was also aware of the interdependent relationship between ideas and propaganda. He saw the task of propaganda as being “to win people over to an idea, so deeply, so vividly, that in the end they become addicted to it and can no longer get away from it.”[14]

An idea is not only the first and everlasting focus for the propagandist. It is the most important of all. If it fails in positioning itself outside the establishment, the entire movement does not resonate with the populace. According to Kracauer, Nazi propaganda in the mid-1930s could be understood as “an undertaking aimed at dynamizing the rigid system within which it stands. Only by unhinging this system, dismantling its stable framework, and shaking up the debris does it gain the possibility of distinguishing itself and gaining influence.”[15]

At the beginning of the 1930s, Hitler declared that his goal was to “bridge the differences between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” and that he wanted to “achieve the inner unification of millions of people who were drifting apart.”[16] Goebbels presented this political idea in propaganda terms: “The battle cries are heard everywhere, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Bavarians, the Prussians, the bourgeois, the proletarians. One must conclude that there are no Germans left in Germany.”[17] The other parties had “set themselves up on our bleeding backs.” The nation was wasting its strength internally, which was the “consequence of corrupt party politics.”[18] So away with party diversity, representative democracy, and ultimately away with parliament. Away with contradictions, complexity, and debate. A central idea for the good of the community of the people. In the name of national unity.

So what do the contemporary political ideas of propaganda politicians look like?

Viktor Orbán offers an impressive example. He was one of the founders of the initially liberal Fidesz party. With the fall of communism, it had become part of Hungary’s party spectrum. In February 1992, Orbán, the leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group, uttered sentences that, in retrospect, are quite remarkable: “We have consistently refused to fight in such a way that the pure are on one side, the wicked on the other, the patriots are on one side, the traitors on the other [. . .] The ethnonational idea, the populist policy, is opposed to liberalism.”[19]

But when strife broke out in Fidesz, and the party suffered a bitter political defeat in 1994, the ambitious Orbán turned in on himself. Being the leader of a small 5-percent party was far from enough for him. His biographer, Paul Lendvai, believes what came next was a calculated maneuver to somehow get into power.[20] Orbán’s political idea can only be understood as an act of restorative nostalgia. Hungary had been on the losing side of history since the mid-nineteenth century.[21] Orbán saw an opportunity to focus his political ambition entirely on the battered Hungarian soul. He followed the idea of breathing self-esteem back into Hungarians. It was to be Us. Us against Them. Them could be Russia, the European Union, Merkel, or migrants. In this logic, Orbán now spoke of the homeland and of Magyarism, which has its roots in the tenth century. He put national interests above everything, prayed publicly, and praised Christianity and the fatherland. Orbán thus left the level of separate interests and moved Fidesz out of the existing party spectrum. In the 1998...