Propaganda

If the liberal democracies invented the tools, the total states of the 1930s built the factory. Colon devotes his most detailed pages to the regimes that treated propaganda not as a wartime expedient but as the permanent nervous system of the state. In Germany, Joseph Goebbels ran a Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that controlled every newspaper, every film, every radio broadcast, and understood, before almost anyone, that the emotional register mattered more than the argument. Goebbels studied Bernays. He also, according to Bernays himself, kept his books.

The Nazi innovation was less any single technique than the totality of the ambition — the fusion of image, sound, ritual, and repetition into an environment from which there was no exit. The Nuremberg rallies were choreographed for the camera; the cheap Volksempfänger radio was designed to receive German stations and little else; Leni Riefenstahl turned a party congress into a work of cinema. Colon insists on the craft, because underestimating it is a way of misunderstanding how ordinary people were carried along.

Alongside the propagandists ran a second history, quieter and more respectable: the researchers who turned persuasion into a science. Colon follows the thread through the American social sciences, where the study of propaganda became, paradoxically, one of the engines of its refinement. Harold Lasswell mapped its structure; the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, an émigré from Vienna, built the survey methods that let campaigns measure what actually moved people rather than guess.

The Second World War accelerated everything. Frank Capra's Why We Fight films, produced for the US Army, were tested on soldiers to see which arguments changed minds. Psychologists studied morale, rumor, and the conditions under which an audience would accept a message from a source it distrusted. The findings crossed effortlessly from the war effort into the peacetime economy. The men who had persuaded a nation to fight came home to persuade it to buy, and the advertising industry of the 1950s absorbed the wartime science wholesale.

The step Colon asks his reader to take is the one we resist most. It is easy to house propaganda safely in the past, in totalitarian regimes and grainy black-and-white footage. His book refuses that quarantine. The techniques he tracks did not die with the dictators; they were inherited, refined, and normalized by the open societies that defeated them, which had helped invent them in the first place. The line between informing a public and manufacturing its consent turns out to be far thinner, and far more porous, than democratic self-image allows.

Consider how much of the modern apparatus is simply the old apparatus with better instruments. Public relations, political consulting, corporate communications, and government "strategic messaging" are all direct descendants of Bernays and the Creel Committee, operating in plain sight and often with pride. The emotional targeting the total states pioneered by intuition is now performed by measurement — focus groups, sentiment analysis, and, in the digital age, the microtargeting of individual voters with messages tuned to their private anxieties. Colon reads the data-driven campaigns of recent years not as a rupture but as a continuation, the same logic running on faster machinery.

Edward Bernays lived to a hundred and three, long enough to watch the word he had proudly claimed become unspeakable and his methods become ubiquitous under kinder names. The century that Colon surveys is bracketed by that irony: the technique flourished exactly as its name went into hiding. Public relations, communications, messaging, information — the vocabulary keeps changing, and the changes are themselves a kind of propaganda, a way of persuading us that persuasion has stopped.