Propaganda as Literature: A Distant Reading of the Korean Central News Agency's Headlines

A rather long post on reading the Korean Central News Agency's headlines I am not putting directly on this blog because it contains interactive graphs that I cannot figure out how to embed, but look nice on GitHub. North Korean politics plus lots of data art, including baroque Sankey flow diagrams!

See it here.

Big Lies at the Monkey Cage

No, not that post. Just me talking about the uses of lies in politics, which may interest some readers here.

Posts at the Monkey Cage are highly constrained in terms of length and style, so I may as well use this blog for some additional notes and clarifications.

Mythical Lies. One point that perhaps could be stressed with respect to the political uses of myth would be that their acceptance always depends on the persuasiveness of alternative narratives. Moreover, it seems to me that the acceptance of myths usually hinges on taking particular narratives “seriously but not literally,” as was sometimes said of Trump supporters (and could, of course, be said of many other people).

For example, the appeal of the Soviet socialist myth in the 1930s did not hinge on its general accuracy or the degree to which practice lived up to its internal standards, but on its articulation of values that seemed plainly superior to the ones on offer by the major alternative narratives (liberal capitalist or fascist). Not everyone may have felt “dizzy with success” in the 1930s, but little that was credible could be said for capitalism at the time (a lack of credibility reinforced by the impossibility of travel and centralized control of information, of course, but not only by that). Here’s Stephen Kotkin in his magisterial Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization:

The antagonism between socialism and capitalism, made that much more pronounced by the Great Depression, was central not only to the definition of what socialism turned out to be, but also to the mind-set of the 1930s that accompanied socialism’s construction and appreciation. This antagonism helps explain why no matter how substantial the differences between rhetoric and practice or intentions and outcome sometimes became, people could still maintain a fundamental faith in the fact of socialism’s existence in the USSR and in that system’s inherent superiority. This remained true, moreover, despite the Soviet regime’s manifest despotism and frequent resort to coercion and intimidation. Simply put, a rejection of Soviet socialism appeared to imply a return to capitalism, with its many deficiencies and all-encompassing crisis— a turn of events that was then unthinkable. (Magnetic Mountain, pp. 153-54).

On one reading of Soviet history, the valence of the capitalist and socialist myths eventually reversed (perhaps by the late 1970s? Or later?): capitalism came to seem fundamentally superior to many Soviet citizens, despite its problems (which, incidentally, were constantly pointed out by Soviet propaganda), while Soviet socialism came to appear unworkable and stagnant (despite the material advantages that many Soviet citizens enjoyed, including great employment stability). But this reversal in valence had less to do with specific facts (popular Soviet views of capitalism in the early 90s could be remarkably misinformed) than with an overall loss of trust in the values Soviet myths articulated, reinforced by decades of failed prophecy about the coming abundance. (Perhaps best conceptualized as a cumulative reputational cost of lying?).

Strategic Lies. One thing I did not emphasize in the piece is that people may of course be predisposed to believe lies that accord with their deep-seated identities. Everyone has their own favorite examples of this, though I am reluctant to speak of “belief” in some of the more extreme cases. (See, e.g., this post about the differential predispositions of voters to identify the bigger crowd in two pictures of the inauguration; perhaps it’s better to speak here of people giving the finger to the interviewers, reasserting their partisan identities). But by the same token, these lies do not work for groups whose identities predispose them to reject the message or the messenger (e.g., Democrats, in the question about inauguration pictures).

So “identity-compatible lies” (anyone have a better term?) should be understood as ways to mobilize people, not necessarily (or only) to deceive them, which put them in the same functional category as “loyalty lies” below. From a tactical standpoint, the question then is about the marginal persuasive effect of such lies: does telling a big lie that will be embraced by supporters and rejected by non-supporters increase or reduce the chances that an uncommitted person will believe you?

I’m not sure there’s an obvious answer to this question that is valid for most situations. In any case, it seems to me that, over time, the marginal persuasive effect should decrease, and even become negative (as seems to be happening in Venezuela, where in any case most people who are not Chavistas can and do simply “exit” government propaganda by changing the channel or turning off the TV, and the remaining Chavistas become increasingly subject to cognitive dissonance (how come after all the “successes” proclaimed by the government in the economic war, the other side is still winning?).

Loyalty Lies. The idea that baldfaced lies can help cement the loyalty of the members of a ruling group when trust is scarce seems to be becoming commonplace; both Tyler Cowen and Matthew Yglesias provide good analyses of how this may work within the context of the Trump administration. (Cowen is also interesting on what I would call “lies as vagueness” and their function in maintaining flexibility within coalitions, which I didn’t mention, but which are obviously related to this and this).

But I wanted to plug in specifically a really nice paper by Schedler and Hoffmann (linked, but not mentioned, in my Monkey Cage piece) that stresses the need to “dramatize” unity in authoritarian environments in order to deter challengers during times of crisis. Their key example is the Cuban transition of power from Fidel to Raul Castro (2006-2011) – a situation which saw the need for supposedly “liberal” members of the Cuban regime to show convincingly that they were in fact “on the same page” as everyone else in the elite. And the same need to dramatize unity in a crisis seems to me to be driving the apparent lunacy of some of the statements by Venezuelan officials (check out Hugo Perez Hernaiz’s Venezuelan Conspiracy Theories Monitor for a sampling).

I suspect that the need to dramatize loyalty within a coalition (by “staying on the same page” and thus saying only the latest lie du jour) may conflict with the imperatives of strategic lying (saying things that are credible to the larger groups). Here the tradeoff is about the relative value of support outside vs. support within the ruling group; the less you depend on the former, the less it matters whether elite statements are believed "outside."

The Futility of Propaganda

When asked, “What do you know about Yugoslavia?” the peasant, painstaking and placid, answered, “It is a pseudosocialist country run by revisionist hyenas in the pay of American capitalism.”
Somewhat later, the interviewer asked: “If you could choose, where would you like to live?”
“Well, in Yugoslavia, for example”
“Why?”
“It seems that in pseudosocialist countries run by revisionist hyenas in the pay of American capitalism, oil and cotton cloth are not rationed.”

From an interview, sometime in the early 1960s, of a Chinese peasant who had fled to Hong Kong from the People’s Republic of China. Found in Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows, p. 52.

Propaganda as Signaling

In a lovely piece published nearly three decades ago, the French historian Paul Veyne noted that much “propaganda” art throughout history has been “without viewers.” His key example was Trajan’s Column:

“Trajan’s Column Panorama” by Juan Francisco Adame Lorite. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Not far from the Forum in Rome, Trajan’s Column raises its shaft thirty meters. Spiraling around it is a sculpted frieze whose 184 scenes and one thousand figures illustrate, like a cartoon strip, the conquest of Dacia by Trajan. Except for the first two spirals, viewers cannot make out these reliefs. Archaeologists study them with binoculars. Moreover, nobody would want to itemize this repetitious swarm or try to follow the account of military campaigns declaimed by the conquest of barbarian villages whose name or place on the map was unknown. Historians explain Trajan’s Column as a work of “imperial propaganda”. That shows how much a shortsighted rationality, one that cannot distinguish between expression and information, keeps its prestige even to our day, when it brings something to “society” or states what this thing is assumed to “bring to society”. We may however doubt that the Romans of Trajan’s time looked very much more at the reliefs, materially invisible, than today’s Romans and that they rushed to this spectacle to go around the Column twenty-three times with their noses in the air. The Column does not inform people; it simply lets them see the evidence of the greatness of Trajan faced with time and the weather. In the same way, at the summit of the Behistun Rock, Darius the Great had a monumental inscription engraved in three languages to the glory of his reign. This inscription was not meant to be read: it is located at the top of a peak, and only eagles or mountain climbers suspended on their ropes could read it (p. 3)

Behistun Rock inscription by Hara1603. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The lack of clear visibility of the great works of imperial art is so common, according to Veyne, it is hardly noticed, and when noticed it is explained as if it were some embarrassing technical fault. (The sculptor of the Vendôme column, a “faithful imitation” of Trajan’s column constructed for Napoleon, published a book to explain the meaning of the reliefs, since these could not be seen from below; he thought the book “might be helpful” given their invisibility. One wonders how many people read the book). Though Veyne did not use this terminology, his argument was that such works were a form of costly signaling:

The Column expresses the glory of Trajan, just as the heavens (which it is useless to itemize star by star) express the glory of Jahweh. In both cases there have to be far too many stars and far too many sculpted scenes. The expression of a superiority is only undoubted when it is excessive (p. 3)

Imperial art was thus not a way to transmit some specific ideological content to “legitimate” the social order, and its political force did not depend on any understanding of its meaning:

What the Column bears as ideology is the right it claims to exist, just as, in a country submitted to an authoritarian regime, loud-speakers diffusing official discourse in the streets count more for their omnipresence than for what they broadcast. Trajan’s Column is propaganda of a sort but not because of its imagery. It is such for its presence and for the power expressed by its redundancy (p. 11)

The same was true, mutatis mutandi, of most (especially political) rituals, whose meaning, painstakingly reconstructed by the anthropologist, is only dimly recognized, if at all, by participants. Much ritual activity, in Veyne’s view, was “conduct without belief,” as the title of the article had it, not because participants actively disbelieved or resisted what was said in and through the ritual but simply because they did not have the foggiest idea about its meaning:

Their multiplicity of meaning and the feeble intensity of the meaning most generally received make these ceremonials a behavior that functions at only about ten percent of their energy[,] and that meaning is not the one involving their content and what their creator intended. It is not the words of the Marseillaise that matter, when the day-nursery is inaugurated with music (p. 13)

Veyne’s point was not that official rituals are necessarily unconvincing or incredible, but that most of the time most people just aren’t paying enough attention to “get” the official message. (This point should not be a surprise to anyone who has ever given a lecture to a crowd of indifferent students). The meaningful content of official ritual and art matters much less than its limited emotional charge and oppressive bulk. For example, the Stalin cult required enormous resources to maintain, and much specialist energy was devoted to its symbolic construction. Yet despite the vast efforts of historians to understand the iconography of the cult (see, e.g., Jan Plamper’s The Stalin Cult), most Soviet citizens only engaged with cult productions superficially and without enthusiasm, hardly in the way required for any detailed understanding of their meaning. The Stalin cult was powerful primarily because Stalin was powerful, not because it had some specially designed symbolic content that most people “got.” A similar thing could be said of the later rituals of Soviet power, described with such care in Christel Lane’s The Rites of Rulers, and intentionally designed, on her account, to impress Soviet citizens with a wide variety of explicit values. Yet there is little evidence that the symbolism of these rituals had any but the most passing influence on the values and attachments of Soviet citizens to the political order; to the extent that they worked to “legitimate” the regime (as Lane claimed in a 1984 piece), such legitimation was predicated on the “signal” of the permanence and power of the CPSU, which was soon to vanish. As Veyne puts the key point more poetically:

We must […] be careful not to infer from the ceremonial of coronation of kings, for example, what monarchy is and what is thought of it and to bring grist to the mill of the ideological analysis of symbols. This ceremony does not show us the real visage of monarchy: it is merely a portrait by a court painter. The subjects of the king in all probability think something different of the monarchical regime. Even more probably, they think less of it: every portrait painter embellishes, interprets and defines the features of the model. (p. 14).

As long time readers will know, I think the “signaling” view of official ritual and propaganda is more often closer to reality than the “indoctrination” view, so Veyne’s ideas cater to my prejudices. Yet the “signaling” view of propaganda goes against the commonsense view that authoritarian ritual and propaganda “works” insofar as it indoctrinates or educates. (For example, my students are enormously resistant to it; I sometimes think that there must be some evolutionary benefit to believing that other people always believe what they are told, given my difficulties in convincing them otherwise). So I was interested to learn of new piece forthcoming in Comparative Politics, fittingly entitled “Propaganda as Signaling,” by Haifeng Huang, which provides further evidence for the signaling view.

The study looks at students exposed to mandatory political education courses in a Chinese University. These courses are seen as a pain:

Chinese students in general and even many instructors regard such courses as nuisances, i.e., rituals that they dislike but have to observe. Students also typically regard the courses as useless for their future careers. When asked how they treated the political education courses, only 8.0% of the students surveyed in the study reported they somewhat actively studied for the courses, with the rest acknowledging that they listened to lectures only casually, did not listen to lectures at all, relied on cram sessions to prepare for exams, or simply skipped some classes (p. 9)

The clever bit of the study exploits the fact that, since nobody likes these boring courses, student performance should thus depend primarily on their incentive and ability to maintain a high GPA. Conditional on academic standing, family income, Communist party membership, and the like, their satisfaction with the government should thus be unrelated to their recall of propaganda content. And indeed this is what Huang finds: people who do better at recalling propaganda content glorifying the CCP (the “good students”, let’s say) are no more likely to be satisfied with the government than people who do not recall such content. But the “good students” do appear to show a diminished willingness to challenge the CCP through dissent actions. They are more likely to believe, in Huang’s view, that the government is strong, even if it is not good.

Now, Huang does not dismiss the possibility of propaganda as indoctrination, though such socialization into regime values would happen in the more lively public sphere and by more indirect means. Moreover, the exact mechanism by which the better students believe that the government is strong is not altogether clear from the paper. (Perhaps they are more likely to attribute their boredom to the government’s ability to compel their attention, and thus draw inferences about the government’s strength? Perhaps their “ability” means they are simply more likely to form accurate beliefs about the government’s strength, irrespective of their feelings of satisfaction?). But the basic point is surely correct: power “legitimates” power in this case. Indeed, I suspect the very popularity of nationalist symbolism in the wider Chinese public sphere shows the same thing: it’s not that the government is powerful because it has been able to craft some very specific nationalist narrative that cleverly appeals to people’s values, but its ability to project strength makes the nationalist narratives a bit like Trajan’s column: a reminder of the CCP’s apparent permanence and overwhelming strength.