Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s “Evil Genius” and Reich Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, who is generally believed to be responsible for bringing that seventeenth century Vatican-created term “propaganda” into disrepute, stated that: “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result …. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.” And in “Munitions of the Mind,” Philip Taylor defined propaganda as “the deliberate attempt to persuade people to think and behave in a desired way.” According to him, propaganda differs from education in that the latter seeks to enable people to make up their mind on any given issue while propaganda is about persuading people to do things which benefit those who, either directly or indirectly, are doing the persuading.
Dr. Goebbels is said to have outlined some principles of propaganda, which we may want to note as we attempt to decipher the myriad information with which we are being bombarded during this pre-election period.
In relation to the enemy, propaganda must be planned and executed by one authority; it should be carefully timed and is best facilitated by leaders with prestige; the enemy’s events and leaders should be labeled with distinctive phrases or slogans which are easily learned and should be utilised again and again; credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false; material from enemy propaganda may be utilised when it helps to diminish that enemy’s prestige or lends support to one’s own objective.
When dealing with one’s constituency, propaganda must prevent the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred; it must reinforce anxiety concerning the consequences of defeat; diminish the impact of frustration (inevitable frustrations must be anticipated and placed in perspective); if it cannot immediately prevent a strong enemy response, it must offer some form of action or diversion (http://www.scribd.com/Goebbels-Principles-of-Propaganda).
The young mind is said to be particularly susceptible to propaganda, so unless the information contained in it is recognised as being fallacious, one could grow into adulthood with a totally distorted vision of the truth. Given the fierce ideological struggle that has taken place in our history, Guyana has been and continues to be a hotbed of propaganda and many aspects of the past to which we consciously or unconsciously subscribe are extremely questionable.
In its determination to remove and keep at bay what it claimed was the communist political party, the colonial regime and their national and international allies went to absurd lengths with their negative portrayal of the PPP and its associates. However, given our history, which has been dominated by ‘socialist’ parties of various forms, we have discarded many of those colonial anti-communist beliefs.
In this early propaganda struggle, the PPP was not a saint and since then it has continually propagated certain themes that present a false but rosy picture of its earlier achievements, many of which we still believe.
Over the years we have been told again and again and are still being told in this election campaign (which perhaps accounts for the wide belief) that, notwithstanding the travails that the PPP government confronted in the 1950s and 60s, it was able to significantly grow the economy. The figures below however show quite clearly that this is a false claim. This is not to deny that in the circumstances of continued strife and a significant rise in the population the regime did quite well to hold an even keel but the assault on the national consciousness of claims of significant growth in the economy and standard of living is unjustified.
● UNESCO Education Survey Mission to British Guyana, 1963
● World Bank: WDI
In his 1965 budget presentation, Finance Minister Mr. Peter D’Aguiar accepted that the economy had stagnated, although he did not point out that his UF and the PNC, which then formed the government, contributed significantly to that stagnation. He did however also make the following point, which takes me to my second example. He claimed, as the numbers below indicate, that the public debt had increased significantly.
● Bank of Guyana Annual Report 1977
D’Aguiar said that the per capita debt, which had been $74 in 1954, was then $211 compared to $228 in Trinidad but that the per capita incomes of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago were US$290 and US$740, respectively! It is worth noting that this level of increase came from a regime whose capacity to borrow was severely limited by the national and international forces opposed to it. The point is that it is only persistent propaganda that has made us believe that the tendency towards substantially increasing the public debt was a phenomenon of the Burnham era.
Finally, I grew up believing that the PPP government was responsible for facilitating the flat self-help scheme houses (one of which I grew up in) in Beterverwagting/Triumph and East and West Ruimveldt, etc. It was only in about 2003, as I was doing some education research (which itself was most revealing) that I came to realise, and the numbers below appear to substantiate, that my belief was most likely incorrect.
● Bank of Guyana Annual Report 1977
What happened was that the interim government, put in place after the suspension of the constitution in 1953, sought to gain support in urban and other areas by the provision of low income housing. The PPP came to office in 1957 and in 1959 capital spending on housing was less $1m but it associated the colonial housing programme with itself, much as it seeks to do today with Desmond Hoyte’s efforts of the early 1990s.
All the propaganda in the world cannot improve our extremely poor condition: all it does is obstruct the search for alternatives. A concerted effort at change requires that we both accept our condition and realise that it results largely from inappropriate political organisations, and that indeed, our destiny is ours to mould.
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
