Jacques Ellul's Use Of Propaganda

Something deft, something that was mystifying as well as very straight forward, — or so it would like to appear — during the last great war, a new field of film started popping up, along with posters, speeches and laws: propaganda; a great machine for the authoritarian power. A noted scholar on the field of philosophy was Jacques Ellul, who stated in his book Propaganda that “it has become a very general phenomenon in the modern world.” (Ellul IX) He argues that propaganda does not entirely exit in the mind of the political regime, but in the everyday realities of society and “nation self-awareness.” While propaganda comes in many forms — films, posters, rhetoric, laws; all at various levels of effectiveness — it is most prevalent in the United

While the correlations between what is viewed today in the US and ninety years ago in pre-Nazi Germany bear little resemblance to the fact, there is still this deceiving articulation of the written and spoken word that warrants study; however the US has prided itself as being a nation capable of ingesting resistance to power. Yet there is still a mass consolidation of business aristocracy that is running rampant in the US economy, along with outsourcing and decreased labor; however that is not the subject of this paper, it is worth

John Cacloppo of the University of Iowa and Richard Petty of the University of Missouri-Columbia wrote that “People are subjected to a nearly constant barrage of persuasive appeals.” (Cacloppo and Petty 91) Within the same text, a experiment with print ads was conducted by Meryl Lichtenstein and Thomas Srull of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the relationship between consumer memory and judgement. In their findings, they concluded “that the relationship between memory and judgement is mediated by the processing strategy one adopts at the time of information acquisition.” (Lichtenstein & Srull 122) Their findings proved that the constant and consistent barrage of advertising to people not only influences decision making (generally within the context of a product), but is retained so much within the memory that further decision making is also affected. Print media has in recent years become less pervasive and relevant to todays, while the consumer is shifting towards an internet based objective in relation to the acquisition of nearly everything worth consuming; a bright and frequent barrage of ad permeates nearly every nook and cranny of the internet, further adding to this manipulation of