In my post on rhetoric I went through Aristotle’s breakdown of Logos, Ethos and Pathos. Where logos is the argument, or reasoned argument. Pathos is the emotional wrapping and ethos is the character of the speaker. Propaganda is rhetoric with a heavy focus towards pathos and ethos, while logos is manipulated for a purpose.
Propaganda utilizes a range of logical fallacies, fallacious statistics, misrepresentations and most importantly, it seeks to influence using emotion, rather than argument. The representation can be illustrated with the difference of “information communicated for it’s own sake” and “information communicated with an agenda behind it“.
If you understand the agenda, you can deconstruct the propaganda. In politics they call this spin. Not acting militarily and relying on diplomacy can spun as being a “advocate for peaceful solutions and limiting human casualties” and “A weak man, who fails to act decisively and relies on words.” The same facts ending up in two very different places.
Logic and facts communicated is informing.
Logic and facts communicated with a weight towards rhetoric is marketing.
If you get the feeling that someone is marketing to you, become immediately suspicious, because numbers, facts and logic can be spun just as easily through rhetoric, through cherry-picking and many other means. To frame truth as a lie and a lie as truth, lies in the cornerstone of propaganda. To mix truth with lie, empowers the lie, as it may be viewed as true by repetition or association.
I’ll end on a quote
“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”
Nietzsche
