Projection as Propaganda: A Classic Essay on Right Wing Polemic

Phil Agre of the Red Rock Eater's deconstruction of Election 2000 truth-slaying attacks by Republican operatives and their dupes on the Internet is required reading for anyone who wants to understand Internet propaganda techniques:

http://www.spectacle.org/1200/agre.html

Agre analyses the abuses of Projection, which Republicans and right wingers--actually any ideologue who has an any-means-necessary compulsion to advance the cause--are particurly apt to fall into using. Whereas most people think of propaganda as a conscious choice to deceive, projection is more insidious. If it were conscious, it would be something like the Situationist idea of détournement--taking a popular icon and subverting it to mean something opposite, much as Ad Busters does with corporate brands. But it isn't conscious. Here's how Agre describes it:


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Several people have asked me where they can read more about the role of projection in politics. It would seem that we are stuck with it. The answer is, I don't know of any political works that discuss the role of projection, which I find surprising given what I perceive as overwhelming dominance of projection in contemporary political discourse. The best book about projection that I know, at least the best for a general audience, is Robert Bly's "A Little Book on the Human Shadow" (Harper and Row, 1988). Bly uses the Jungian word "shadow" instead of "projection", but that doesn't mean you have to buy the totality of Jung's theories. The idea is that people who disown parts of themselves thereby acquire a "shadow": the disowned parts are still real and active, but they operate secretively, under the cover of a darkness that one creates by dimming one's own consciousness. Some people disown the weak parts of themselves, or the emotional parts, or even (as in George W. Bush's case) the intelligent parts. Faced with the problem of getting rid of these parts of themselves, people often project those disowned, negatively valued parts into other people. Someone who has homosexual feelings, for example, might choose to disown them, project them, and thereby develop a hatred for homosexuals. This is perhaps one reason why conservative operatives are so often discovered to have hidden lives.

<end cite>

Anyone who has debated a winger about Election 2000 will surely have come across projection. Just think of all those nuts out there who apparently believe with all their "hearts" and "souls" that Al Gore tried to steal the election. This is a very common propaganda tool, and it's particularly dangerous because it infests its host. The employer of this tool is not in control of it. It is in control of him or her.

Note: This post was inspired by a thread in the Lounge on "Favorite Propaganda Techniques. The whole article cited above is very much worth reading, as are Agre's other pieces on the degeneration of political discourse in the US.

with new title.

even if they're no commenting on it.

The stuff about the ease at which language is "repackaged" into short, Goebbelsian (my word) assaults/lies that take 5 times the effort to "unpack" by which time people have tuned out and thrown their arms up in confusion, is brilliant (wish I'd thought of it).

There was a two-month period when I made this my signature line so more people would read this excellent treatise (hint hint, BurtWorm).

Agre is awesome and I hope I have the cell next to him in the Arizona Gulag in 2022 (All Hail Emperor George P. Caligula!)

I didn't notice, TP. The truth is I don't look at signatures very closely usually. But I'm impressed that you used him that way.

Are you on the list? Have you gotten anything from him recently?

In late 2001, I think, or not long thereafter.

And it was a different link to the same article, in Red Rock Eaters jounral, or something.

No, I'm not on Phil's list, though.

Just a "distant" admirer of his work on the Bushevik Polemic

(which is really the Nazi Polemic, less-violent, but with 50+ more years of "progress" in psychomanipulation)

ass

:kick:


on edit- this is the "Notes on the New Jargon" guy, isn't it? I don't have that essay on me at the moment, but the name rings a bell

"Notes..." is a must-read!

Wonder why?

... of recent propagandistic projections by Republican talking heads. I don't remember exactly which cable TV shows I was watching when I heard these phrases (most likely it was Crossfire for both), but they stuck in my mind.

A great example of a related propaganda phenomenon is Dubya's "Leave No Child Behind" campaign. Rove stole that exact slogan from the Children's Defense Fund, and used it as what Newt Gingrich called a "shield issue" for photo-ops. Meanwhile, poor children were being omitted from child tax credit legislation, extreme child poverty was going up, and food stamp coverage and health insurance were going down.

Both phenomena could be considered examples of what George Orwell called "inversions" -- propaganda that stifles protest by appropriating the very language dissenters would need to use to try to fight tyrannical government.

Inversion is a good word to describe that. The Situationists in Paris '68 used a similar tack called détournement, turning corporate iconography back in on itself. As I said in the first post of this thread, this is the tactic Ad Busters employs.

Projection, however, is more like what Bill O'Reilly does when he accuses Al Franken and others of his critics of being incivil. It is related to inversion in the sense that it denies the truth of what the propagandist represents, stealing the shell of its opponent's virtues and putting its own vices onto the head of its opponent.

I was looking for a citation to a South African's existential study of himself from way back-- argh, the name will come to me-- anyway, happened upon an essay about Frantz Fanon's humanism, and I think this is a relevant tack. Fanon understood this shit. Excuse me, but that's what it is. Fanon understood this shit. Lately we've seen it become weaponized in new and terrifying ways, but the truth is it was always terrifiying. It was meant to be. Now we're seeing it turned against many other selves, but the logic is not new. White people like myself need to understand this shit because it's coming down on all of us and we have a choice to be like crappy humans and live miserably or wake the fuck up and actively think for ourselves.

Sorry to spew. I'll be back with a citation for a very insightful book and no profanity.