Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast I'm at a Turkey and to Skipson, joined by staff writer Jane mcgrad. Hey there, Jane. We've got a pretty hot Putton issue to talk about today. Propaganda and propaganda isn't just I want you posters featuring Uncle Sam has a dark side too. That's right, it does have a dark side. I think it's most known for back in World War Two with the Hitler and his propaganda machine. But we're gonna take a step back first and uh and talk about the origin of propaganda, which dates back to about sixteen twenty two with actually the Catholic Church when Popa named Gregory the fifteenth I believe he uh started the Congregation of Propaganda. And you know, at this at the time, it's not like a hot button word. It just meant that he wanted to convert back people who had converted to Protestantism from the Reformation at the time exactly. So it was a type of missionary work. Really, and you may not think that missionary work is synonymous with propaganda, but when you take the term propaganda and look at it in a nutshell, you can see that. You know, it does fall into the big umbrella. And essentially, propagandas a type of media, whether it's print or broadcast, it's used to convey a message to persuade someone to do something, and it could be good or it could be bad. When you're trying to convince someone to act in a way that would benefit himself or herself, then you know, you could say that propaganda isn't too harmful. But if you're trying to disseminate information that's really one sided and you're not sharing all the facts, and ultimately, if you persuade a person to act a certain way it's going to be detrimental to him or her, then you've got a case of bad propaganda. And if we're dancing around the issue, what exactly is propaganda is because it is such a widely disputed definition, like scholars like dedicate their their academic lives to defining propaganda, So you know, we have to take this talk with a grain of salt of wood. Is propaganda it's different leagues of different people. Yeah, and we know that origins of propaganda may stretch back as far as biblical times when an Assyrian king actually used fear propaganda, which is a type that will get into in a second, to wage the surrender of the Kingdom of Judah. And there are some scholars who say that Caesar may have used propaganda propaganda to bolster his reputation. So ultimately, Jane is going to get into a really interesting story about propaganda. But before we can get there, we're going to cover some basic so that you guys can have a better, more scholarly understanding of what propaganda is. And I think that a good place to start, just to get you guys thinking about that, is to tell you about a few different types of groups that use propaganda today. So think about the last anti smoking commercial you saw, or a safe driving campaign, or maybe some of you out there are high schoolers and there's someone who comes right before senior prom and you know, brings a smashed up car into the quad, someone who is driving drunk, you know, gotten to an accident with This is propaganda. It's a it's a visual technique, it's an oral technique, something to convince you to act a certain way. And it's not just anti something groups. That's businesses, it's political groups, it's governmental organizations, it's political candidates. Certainly all of out there heard a radio add or saw a television spot back, you know, before the November elections. Right off of this time, we're like, we're just inundated with these political messages commercial every two seconds for this candidate or that candidate. Oh, this is propaganda, and you're right to mention. Uh, we usually think of propaganda as these sort of political messages, but of course everything from anti smoking ads to drinking ads, etcetera, etcetera. And don't confuse propaganda with advertisements. You have to think about who's disseminating the message to you, who is trying to get you to act in a certain way. And we'll get into a couple of different ways that you can tell advertisements from propaganda. So now let's talk about some different techniques that people use propaganda. Uh. The first one is usually associated with propaganda is called name calling. And that's exactly what it sounds like, you guys, Yeah, it is. It's it's basically from the schoolyard, you know, when you used to call someone a name, and basically people say that you can do this or people usually do do this when they want to take the focus off of themselves, and they don't want to answer a question directly, they don't have a very good argument to return with, and so they just turn it on the their opponent and they call them something like a hypocrite or a traitor. Yeah, and it's really effective. And to hearken back again to the November elections. In the campaign, we saw a lot of name calling surrounding Barack Obama because it was really easy to throw terms into the into the mix, like you know, he's a terrorist, or you know he's an Arab or a Muslim. These are some of the terms that people use to name call him. And a lot of the people who were calling him these names did it out of fear or essentially miseducation of of who he really was. It's a cheap and easy and direct way to get the side rallied again to someone. Yeah, that's right. And you bring us to another version or another method for using propaganda, which is fear. And you can see this a lot. I mean not to say one way or the other about about global warming, but global warming proponents who want us to start paying attention to the issue will use fear um in terms of saying, look, what will happen to our society is that planet in general if we don't act, all different kinds of uh of movements use the force of fear to get people to come to their side, and that leads to another good one, and that will not a good one necessarily, but one that's analogous to it, and that's the bandwagon technique. And the idea is that you convince someone well, everybody else is on this side, don't you want to be on this side too? And it plays on the human emotion to not want to be left alone in the dust. So if you know everyone is going to vote a certain way, or everyone you know believes in global warming, then why not jump on the bandwagon? You be part of it too. That's true. And the idea of wanting to be like everyone else brings us to another one that we call plane folks, where elite, lofty politicians can can try to identify with the average ordin person by making him or herself seem like they're dis ordinary exactly. And if you guys remember an earlier podcast we did about a vaparone, we mentioned that she spent a lot of her time going around Argentina kissing babies, cutting ribbons and at grand openings and things like this, and this is you know, politicians around the world use this technique because it's a way to be a part of the mass. And how many pictures have you seen of people running for president or people who are presidents? Um, oh, I don't know, say, jogging to McDonald's for breakfast or lounging on a fishing boat. It's a really good way to keep in touch with the common man when you're not exactly common, that's right. And another method kind of related to that is the idea of transfer, which is taking like a symbol or something that most people like and transferring it to your own cause I correct me if I'm wrong, Candice, But I kind of associate this with the bloody shirt sort of method in terms of calling on emotions that people already have with one thing like uh, you know, the death of a hero or something like that, and bringing it over to their own side and saying, if you if you feel anything for this fallen hero, then you have to join our side sort of thing. Oh, definitely, I think that is applicable or anytime you see again, we we keep coming back to political office, but it's just such, you know, a sellient point. Anytime you see a political figures face in front of an American flag or an eagle or something like that, you get that sense that they're aligned with a symbol that we have a lot of trust in a lot of history. What if you have patriotism? If you exactly? And that brings us to a final technique that we're going to discuss, and that is glittering generalities and use of words like patriotism and liberty and dream and family. The idea of these very scintillating, sweet little messages in terms that you can throw around in context with a person's name, makes it seem like that person is is criticism. If if you say that you know so and so is a family man and he believes in patriotism, well how could he be bad? But if you say, you know, Adolf Hitler is a fly man and he certainly has a dream, we know that, you know, at least retrospectively, his dream wasn't such a good idea. And that brings us to the most popular, the most famous, i should say, propaganda machine run by Hitler. He actually eliminated propaganda from the other side. That's what that's one way to do it is just to get rid of everything that's contrary to what you believe, cut the people off from from their access to that information. And he actually had a Minister of Propaganda in Joseph Goebbel's and he ran the National Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which I think is very interesting name. And Goebel's basically ran all media. Uh he ran news, radio, literature, uh, movies, you name it. There's a famous one called Triumph of the Will. He actually even banned jazz, or at least he tried to, because the music itself seemed too individualistic and he wants to bring people in line, which I didn't know before, and that that was a very interesting fact. Um he was very cunning, and that like even when Germany lost a battle and things didn't look so great, he didn't even falsify and nation. He he didn't want to seem like someone who was covering up. He Um would just sort of, uh draw historical parallels to drive up some spirit. And he would sometimes he would actually say, oh, Germany as a secret weapon. Don't worry guys, Like everything's gonna be all right. So Gobel's is one of the most famous and he is very effective too. I mean, just the whole hype over over Hitler and the idea that Hitler would be bringing Germany back as a world power. It really worked and it was an essential part of Hitler's whole regime, definitely, And I think that the Nazis took a cure from the success of propaganda and World War One and really made propaganda a vital component of their campaign. And as far as I understand, like you were saying, Jane, they dispelled all information that would cast the Nazis and an unfavorable light, and they did things like selling radio is a really rock bottom prices so that everyone could have a medium through which to hear the Nazi message. They were silent films made during the Nazis at work, and Hitler was made to appear very large, larger than life really and and god like, and he was everywhere. He was a very pervasive part of the war. And on the other side, if if you were with the Allies, you could see that it worked pretty well to use Hitler in a way to motivate people back home to act in favor of the war. Say you were trying to ration. Um. There were a couple of US World War Two posters that said things like um uh, waste helps the enemy, or they were trying to get people to conserve fuel by car pooling. And so there was this one poster of a guy in a little car and he's got this um ghost of a figure next to him, which is clearly supposed to be Hitler, and the line reads, when you ride alone, you ride with Hitler. And another one of my favorite one just trying to encourage women to get a wartime job while the men were away. And so it shows this very glamorous looking woman looking very forlorn and staring into the distance. Um and the line that when read's longing won't bring him home any sooner, get a war job, just you know. And and propaganda like that sort of makes you feel good because you look back and you remember when and you you can imagine that people were really, you know, bucking app and and working hard to to feel patriotic and get the country through the war. And I think that's one of the reasons that propaganda like that today is sort of an art form. You know, we can look at it as a piece of art and study the color and the way that the figures are drawn and how art is used versus photography, and we see a photography being used and propaganda from this time too, especially when um, I guess that the people, the masterminds behind the propaganda wanted a really visceral image to really drive the fact home that people were dying out there. And so you can look back at World War two propaganda and see different levels of I guess, of seriousness and appeal to people, trying to get people involved. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned art. That's one thing I find really interesting about propaganda, and like it calls back to an earlier podcast we did on Rosie the Riveter of a They brought in Norman Rockwell uh to pay in a very famous image of of Rosie. UM. But also you look at art in terms of literature, which I find interesting. You take a look at Harriet beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for instance, one of the most famous pieces of propaganda anti slavery propaganda, and books like Marx's Communist Manifesto obviously, Yeah, yeah, incredibly um influential. And actually I was going to say about Marxists, UM later Marxists that came after Karl Marx actually defined propaganda as the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated public, and they contrasted this to what they called agitation. Agitation to them was using half truths and like more underhanded ways to exploit the uneducated. And I find this in an interesting um differentiation. But also they came to the conclusion that they needed to use both of these things in order to succeed at all, and they put it together. They actually all to edgit prop interesting word, but it was just interesting that they knew that they needed to go after the educated and and the uneducated through underhanded means in order to succeed at all. Well, that's really smart, because you can get the uneducated people on your side using techniques like the bandwagon method or glittering generalities. But if you're going to go after college educated people who pride themselves on being independent thinkers and being able to think above the average man, you're going to need a more scruptitious means. Where else you're going to have to appeal to ideological pre steps that no one can argue with. And that's what's so interesting. You brought up Uncle Tom's Cabin. I I read that back in grad school and if you look at you know that the style of prose and the level of vocabulary, I use, it's pretty basic. Anyone could get through that book and the level of reader. It's really long, but you can get through it. It's written very simplistically, and there's something very beautiful about it too, and it's certainly a touching story, but it's meant for any reader, and it brings to mind the idea of it's each communication one I want to a pathos appeal and an ethos appeal. Are you appealing to someone's emotions or you appealing to someone's ethics? And I think it takes two different types of intelligence to relate there, and it helps if you've got both. But if you know, if you're trying to get a wider audience, I think your emotional pills usually the quickest way. And that's when you see people, even like anti abortion protesters standing on the street corner holding up a sign of a fetus or an arm or something that's you know, sort of gory that really gets you right and there. Sure, yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, if we're gonna convey anything in this discussion of propaganda. I think it's the idea that barbaganda can come in so many different forms and for so many different purposes. UM. I know one topic that you're interested in, Candice, is the idea of the cult of Jonestown, which you know, the article we have on site actually mentions drinking the kool aid and that comes from from this cult of convincing people just to um to drink poison basically out of propaganda. And that's that's pretty effective. It's amazing what people can be convinced to do if words are spun. In my such messages are spun and just the right way. And at least in the United States, we should be very grateful for the fact that back in two thousand five, the George W. Bush administration signed into law of the Stop Government Propaganda Now Bill. Essentially, this bill made it unlawful for TV reporters to take money to spend a story and also any messages that are disseminated have to clearly state who's funding them. And the idea is that UM government funds can't be allocated to pay for propaganda. That's right, and this came out of some scandals I think right, uh, if governmental agencies paying TUV reporters to actually skew messages towards UM what they wanted to convey to the people. And so we're really lucky, I know that UM. In China, for instance, the people who live there aren't quite as lucky because the government actually back in two thousand and seven, there was Public Security Ministry hired nearly thirty thousand people to oversee electronic activity. And these are online forums, and the internet is a really largely unmonitored source of propaganda. And it's a double edged sword because while the internet can be helpful for you to research both sides of the story to see, you know, who's trying to get you to think what, it also is a really big center of these confusing propaganda type messages. But in China, when people are browsing online, the government had these two cartoon police caricatures created that sort of pop up every now and then to remind people that their activity was being tracked. And so not only would you be made to feel that you weren't free to educate yourself and to research both sides of the story, but it's known that you know, people over there can't trust necessarily all the statistics that come from the government. There was one case where really heavy rains when summer had flooded parts of of different villages and towns and there were a lot of deaths from drowning, and the government released the stanmth that only thirty or so people had died, and that clearly wasn't the case because a grocery store had been flooded and at least a hundred of people had died in that disaster. And so it's the floodwaters had received at and people could see, you know, the corpses flooding everywhere. It was clear that the government had lied. So again we we should be grateful for our freedoms and also be really responsible and think about who's sending a message and what point is that person trying to get across who's paying them? So buck up, you guys and do your research. That's true, and it's interesting you say it's a double edged sword being having the Internet and everything even I mean horrible of course that that China would would suppress the information from the Internet. But at the same time, when we have more options, people tend to only go to those those places where they know their their own um already established opinions are going to be reinforced. And so you know, you take like if you if you think that some UH news channels, for instance, lean towards the left and some lean towards the right, the idea um that people fear is that people who are more towards the left will only listen to the leftist stations and people towards the right when we listen to the right, and nobody's ever going to get like a moderately objective story. And so that is one drawback to having the Internet and so many variety of of of you know, sources of information, right, I agree, variety It can be bad as well as it can be good. And I know that was an issue that even came up with the Tea thousand eight elections. There were a lot of criticisms thrown out against the media for not being objective and portraying the two presidential candidates and even leading up to the Democratic National Convention, the portrayal of Obama and Clinton respectively, and how things turn out. There so a lot of club of and I think that this year especially and even during the first one days of the administration, the media is really going to be called the task to be fair and to be objective. I think it's easy when you have a young president in office who has such a beautiful family and who is capable of such great things, and the country is going through a hard time. I think it's easy to sway one way and to give out, you know, really excited, hopeful messages. But you can't overlook the facts. So it'll be interesting to see what happened. And as always, when you guys are reading your newspapers and reading your internet news sources and listening to the news on the radio and TV, to be careful and think for yourselves, and be sure to visit our website to get more information on propaganda and some other historical figures that we've discussed on how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast I'm at a Turkey and to Skipson, joined by staff writer Jane mcgrad. Hey there, Jane. We've got a pretty hot Putton issue to talk about today. Propaganda and propaganda isn't just I want you posters featuring Uncle Sam has a dark side too. That's right, it does have a dark side. I think it's most known for back in World War Two with the Hitler and his propaganda machine. But we're gonna take a step back first and uh and talk about the origin of propaganda, which dates back to about sixteen twenty two with actually the Catholic Church when Popa named Gregory the fifteenth I believe he uh started the Congregation of Propaganda. And you know, at this at the time, it's not like a hot button word. It just meant that he wanted to convert back people who had converted to Protestantism from the Reformation at the time exactly. So it was a type of missionary work. Really, and you may not think that missionary work is synonymous with propaganda, but when you take the term propaganda and look at it in a nutshell, you can see that. You know, it does fall into the big umbrella. And essentially, propagandas a type of media, whether it's print or broadcast, it's used to convey a message to persuade someone to do something, and it could be good or it could be bad. When you're trying to convince someone to act in a way that would benefit himself or herself, then you know, you could say that propaganda isn't too harmful. But if you're trying to disseminate information that's really one sided and you're not sharing all the facts, and ultimately, if you persuade a person to act a certain way it's going to be detrimental to him or her, then you've got a case of bad propaganda. And if we're dancing around the issue, what exactly is propaganda is because it is such a widely disputed definition, like scholars like dedicate their their academic lives to defining propaganda, So you know, we have to take this talk with a grain of salt of wood. Is propaganda it's different leagues of different people. Yeah, and we know that origins of propaganda may stretch back as far as biblical times when an Assyrian king actually used fear propaganda, which is a type that will get into in a second, to wage the surrender of the Kingdom of Judah. And there are some scholars who say that Caesar may have used propaganda propaganda to bolster his reputation. So ultimately, Jane is going to get into a really interesting story about propaganda. But before we can get there, we're going to cover some basic so that you guys can have a better, more scholarly understanding of what propaganda is. And I think that a good place to start, just to get you guys thinking about that, is to tell you about a few different types of groups that use propaganda today. So think about the last anti smoking commercial you saw, or a safe driving campaign, or maybe some of you out there are high schoolers and there's someone who comes right before senior prom and you know, brings a smashed up car into the quad, someone who is driving drunk, you know, gotten to an accident with This is propaganda. It's a it's a visual technique, it's an oral technique, something to convince you to act a certain way. And it's not just anti something groups. That's businesses, it's political groups, it's governmental organizations, it's political candidates. Certainly all of out there heard a radio add or saw a television spot back, you know, before the November elections. Right off of this time, we're like, we're just inundated with these political messages commercial every two seconds for this candidate or that candidate. Oh, this is propaganda, and you're right to mention. Uh, we usually think of propaganda as these sort of political messages, but of course everything from anti smoking ads to drinking ads, etcetera, etcetera. And don't confuse propaganda with advertisements. You have to think about who's disseminating the message to you, who is trying to get you to act in a certain way. And we'll get into a couple of different ways that you can tell advertisements from propaganda. So now let's talk about some different techniques that people use propaganda. Uh. The first one is usually associated with propaganda is called name calling. And that's exactly what it sounds like, you guys, Yeah, it is. It's it's basically from the schoolyard, you know, when you used to call someone a name, and basically people say that you can do this or people usually do do this when they want to take the focus off of themselves, and they don't want to answer a question directly, they don't have a very good argument to return with, and so they just turn it on the their opponent and they call them something like a hypocrite or a traitor. Yeah, and it's really effective. And to hearken back again to the November elections. In the campaign, we saw a lot of name calling surrounding Barack Obama because it was really easy to throw terms into the into the mix, like you know, he's a terrorist, or you know he's an Arab or a Muslim. These are some of the terms that people use to name call him. And a lot of the people who were calling him these names did it out of fear or essentially miseducation of of who he really was. It's a cheap and easy and direct way to get the side rallied again to someone. Yeah, that's right. And you bring us to another version or another method for using propaganda, which is fear. And you can see this a lot. I mean not to say one way or the other about about global warming, but global warming proponents who want us to start paying attention to the issue will use fear um in terms of saying, look, what will happen to our society is that planet in general if we don't act, all different kinds of uh of movements use the force of fear to get people to come to their side, and that leads to another good one, and that will not a good one necessarily, but one that's analogous to it, and that's the bandwagon technique. And the idea is that you convince someone well, everybody else is on this side, don't you want to be on this side too? And it plays on the human emotion to not want to be left alone in the dust. So if you know everyone is going to vote a certain way, or everyone you know believes in global warming, then why not jump on the bandwagon? You be part of it too. That's true. And the idea of wanting to be like everyone else brings us to another one that we call plane folks, where elite, lofty politicians can can try to identify with the average ordin person by making him or herself seem like they're dis ordinary exactly. And if you guys remember an earlier podcast we did about a vaparone, we mentioned that she spent a lot of her time going around Argentina kissing babies, cutting ribbons and at grand openings and things like this, and this is you know, politicians around the world use this technique because it's a way to be a part of the mass. And how many pictures have you seen of people running for president or people who are presidents? Um, oh, I don't know, say, jogging to McDonald's for breakfast or lounging on a fishing boat. It's a really good way to keep in touch with the common man when you're not exactly common, that's right. And another method kind of related to that is the idea of transfer, which is taking like a symbol or something that most people like and transferring it to your own cause I correct me if I'm wrong, Candice, But I kind of associate this with the bloody shirt sort of method in terms of calling on emotions that people already have with one thing like uh, you know, the death of a hero or something like that, and bringing it over to their own side and saying, if you if you feel anything for this fallen hero, then you have to join our side sort of thing. Oh, definitely, I think that is applicable or anytime you see again, we we keep coming back to political office, but it's just such, you know, a sellient point. Anytime you see a political figures face in front of an American flag or an eagle or something like that, you get that sense that they're aligned with a symbol that we have a lot of trust in a lot of history. What if you have patriotism? If you exactly? And that brings us to a final technique that we're going to discuss, and that is glittering generalities and use of words like patriotism and liberty and dream and family. The idea of these very scintillating, sweet little messages in terms that you can throw around in context with a person's name, makes it seem like that person is is criticism. If if you say that you know so and so is a family man and he believes in patriotism, well how could he be bad? But if you say, you know, Adolf Hitler is a fly man and he certainly has a dream, we know that, you know, at least retrospectively, his dream wasn't such a good idea. And that brings us to the most popular, the most famous, i should say, propaganda machine run by Hitler. He actually eliminated propaganda from the other side. That's what that's one way to do it is just to get rid of everything that's contrary to what you believe, cut the people off from from their access to that information. And he actually had a Minister of Propaganda in Joseph Goebbel's and he ran the National Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which I think is very interesting name. And Goebel's basically ran all media. Uh he ran news, radio, literature, uh, movies, you name it. There's a famous one called Triumph of the Will. He actually even banned jazz, or at least he tried to, because the music itself seemed too individualistic and he wants to bring people in line, which I didn't know before, and that that was a very interesting fact. Um he was very cunning, and that like even when Germany lost a battle and things didn't look so great, he didn't even falsify and nation. He he didn't want to seem like someone who was covering up. He Um would just sort of, uh draw historical parallels to drive up some spirit. And he would sometimes he would actually say, oh, Germany as a secret weapon. Don't worry guys, Like everything's gonna be all right. So Gobel's is one of the most famous and he is very effective too. I mean, just the whole hype over over Hitler and the idea that Hitler would be bringing Germany back as a world power. It really worked and it was an essential part of Hitler's whole regime, definitely, And I think that the Nazis took a cure from the success of propaganda and World War One and really made propaganda a vital component of their campaign. And as far as I understand, like you were saying, Jane, they dispelled all information that would cast the Nazis and an unfavorable light, and they did things like selling radio is a really rock bottom prices so that everyone could have a medium through which to hear the Nazi message. They were silent films made during the Nazis at work, and Hitler was made to appear very large, larger than life really and and god like, and he was everywhere. He was a very pervasive part of the war. And on the other side, if if you were with the Allies, you could see that it worked pretty well to use Hitler in a way to motivate people back home to act in favor of the war. Say you were trying to ration. Um. There were a couple of US World War Two posters that said things like um uh, waste helps the enemy, or they were trying to get people to conserve fuel by car pooling. And so there was this one poster of a guy in a little car and he's got this um ghost of a figure next to him, which is clearly supposed to be Hitler, and the line reads, when you ride alone, you ride with Hitler. And another one of my favorite one just trying to encourage women to get a wartime job while the men were away. And so it shows this very glamorous looking woman looking very forlorn and staring into the distance. Um and the line that when read's longing won't bring him home any sooner, get a war job, just you know. And and propaganda like that sort of makes you feel good because you look back and you remember when and you you can imagine that people were really, you know, bucking app and and working hard to to feel patriotic and get the country through the war. And I think that's one of the reasons that propaganda like that today is sort of an art form. You know, we can look at it as a piece of art and study the color and the way that the figures are drawn and how art is used versus photography, and we see a photography being used and propaganda from this time too, especially when um, I guess that the people, the masterminds behind the propaganda wanted a really visceral image to really drive the fact home that people were dying out there. And so you can look back at World War two propaganda and see different levels of I guess, of seriousness and appeal to people, trying to get people involved. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned art. That's one thing I find really interesting about propaganda, and like it calls back to an earlier podcast we did on Rosie the Riveter of a They brought in Norman Rockwell uh to pay in a very famous image of of Rosie. UM. But also you look at art in terms of literature, which I find interesting. You take a look at Harriet beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for instance, one of the most famous pieces of propaganda anti slavery propaganda, and books like Marx's Communist Manifesto obviously, Yeah, yeah, incredibly um influential. And actually I was going to say about Marxists, UM later Marxists that came after Karl Marx actually defined propaganda as the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated public, and they contrasted this to what they called agitation. Agitation to them was using half truths and like more underhanded ways to exploit the uneducated. And I find this in an interesting um differentiation. But also they came to the conclusion that they needed to use both of these things in order to succeed at all, and they put it together. They actually all to edgit prop interesting word, but it was just interesting that they knew that they needed to go after the educated and and the uneducated through underhanded means in order to succeed at all. Well, that's really smart, because you can get the uneducated people on your side using techniques like the bandwagon method or glittering generalities. But if you're going to go after college educated people who pride themselves on being independent thinkers and being able to think above the average man, you're going to need a more scruptitious means. Where else you're going to have to appeal to ideological pre steps that no one can argue with. And that's what's so interesting. You brought up Uncle Tom's Cabin. I I read that back in grad school and if you look at you know that the style of prose and the level of vocabulary, I use, it's pretty basic. Anyone could get through that book and the level of reader. It's really long, but you can get through it. It's written very simplistically, and there's something very beautiful about it too, and it's certainly a touching story, but it's meant for any reader, and it brings to mind the idea of it's each communication one I want to a pathos appeal and an ethos appeal. Are you appealing to someone's emotions or you appealing to someone's ethics? And I think it takes two different types of intelligence to relate there, and it helps if you've got both. But if you know, if you're trying to get a wider audience, I think your emotional pills usually the quickest way. And that's when you see people, even like anti abortion protesters standing on the street corner holding up a sign of a fetus or an arm or something that's you know, sort of gory that really gets you right and there. Sure, yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, if we're gonna convey anything in this discussion of propaganda. I think it's the idea that barbaganda can come in so many different forms and for so many different purposes. UM. I know one topic that you're interested in, Candice, is the idea of the cult of Jonestown, which you know, the article we have on site actually mentions drinking the kool aid and that comes from from this cult of convincing people just to um to drink poison basically out of propaganda. And that's that's pretty effective. It's amazing what people can be convinced to do if words are spun. In my such messages are spun and just the right way. And at least in the United States, we should be very grateful for the fact that back in two thousand five, the George W. Bush administration signed into law of the Stop Government Propaganda Now Bill. Essentially, this bill made it unlawful for TV reporters to take money to spend a story and also any messages that are disseminated have to clearly state who's funding them. And the idea is that UM government funds can't be allocated to pay for propaganda. That's right, and this came out of some scandals I think right, uh, if governmental agencies paying TUV reporters to actually skew messages towards UM what they wanted to convey to the people. And so we're really lucky, I know that UM. In China, for instance, the people who live there aren't quite as lucky because the government actually back in two thousand and seven, there was Public Security Ministry hired nearly thirty thousand people to oversee electronic activity. And these are online forums, and the internet is a really largely unmonitored source of propaganda. And it's a double edged sword because while the internet can be helpful for you to research both sides of the story to see, you know, who's trying to get you to think what, it also is a really big center of these confusing propaganda type messages. But in China, when people are browsing online, the government had these two cartoon police caricatures created that sort of pop up every now and then to remind people that their activity was being tracked. And so not only would you be made to feel that you weren't free to educate yourself and to research both sides of the story, but it's known that you know, people over there can't trust necessarily all the statistics that come from the government. There was one case where really heavy rains when summer had flooded parts of of different villages and towns and there were a lot of deaths from drowning, and the government released the stanmth that only thirty or so people had died, and that clearly wasn't the case because a grocery store had been flooded and at least a hundred of people had died in that disaster. And so it's the floodwaters had received at and people could see, you know, the corpses flooding everywhere. It was clear that the government had lied. So again we we should be grateful for our freedoms and also be really responsible and think about who's sending a message and what point is that person trying to get across who's paying them? So buck up, you guys and do your research. That's true, and it's interesting you say it's a double edged sword being having the Internet and everything even I mean horrible of course that that China would would suppress the information from the Internet. But at the same time, when we have more options, people tend to only go to those those places where they know their their own um already established opinions are going to be reinforced. And so you know, you take like if you if you think that some UH news channels, for instance, lean towards the left and some lean towards the right, the idea um that people fear is that people who are more towards the left will only listen to the leftist stations and people towards the right when we listen to the right, and nobody's ever going to get like a moderately objective story. And so that is one drawback to having the Internet and so many variety of of of you know, sources of information, right, I agree, variety It can be bad as well as it can be good. And I know that was an issue that even came up with the Tea thousand eight elections. There were a lot of criticisms thrown out against the media for not being objective and portraying the two presidential candidates and even leading up to the Democratic National Convention, the portrayal of Obama and Clinton respectively, and how things turn out. There so a lot of club of and I think that this year especially and even during the first one days of the administration, the media is really going to be called the task to be fair and to be objective. I think it's easy when you have a young president in office who has such a beautiful family and who is capable of such great things, and the country is going through a hard time. I think it's easy to sway one way and to give out, you know, really excited, hopeful messages. But you can't overlook the facts. So it'll be interesting to see what happened. And as always, when you guys are reading your newspapers and reading your internet news sources and listening to the news on the radio and TV, to be careful and think for yourselves, and be sure to visit our website to get more information on propaganda and some other historical figures that we've discussed on how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.