Propaganda and North Korea

PYONGYANG, North Korea -- The body of North Korea's long-time ruler Kim Jong Il was laid out in a glass coffin Tuesday as weeping mourners filled public plazas and state media fed a budding personality cult around his third son, hailing him as "born of heaven." (huffingtonpost.com)

It is not surprising if you know what propaganda can do to people.

Jacques Ellul (1965) says “ideologies emerge when doctrines are degraded and vulgarized and when an element of belief enters into them” (Ellul, Jacques 193-194). In other words when fiction takes over facts in the process of thinking that lead to practical affairs. Ideology is fiction with an intellectual pedigree to which the members of a community attributes validity. Once and ideology takes hold of a group becomes exclusionary and start expanding by way of conquest, assimilation and propaganda. But in modern society, where means are an end in itself, propaganda becomes autonomous and it doesn’t obey ideology. “Propaganda doesn’t have a precise ideological objective, it has nothing to do with an opinion, an idea or doctrine. It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes. Man must be made to live in a psychological climate” (Ellul 31). Propaganda is a technique based on different branches of sciences and the scientific analysis of sociology and psychology. Ellul studies the psychological effects of group mentality and behavior and sees the fragmentation of the group as a necessary step to make propaganda effective. He makes a distinction between sociological propaganda and direct propaganda; comparing sociological propaganda to plowing and direct propaganda to sowing, they complement each other. “Propaganda of the talk and propaganda of the deed are complementary” (Ellul 15). Ellul also makes a distinction between white propaganda and black propaganda; oral and written propaganda. He says that talk must be corresponded by something visible and that oral or written propaganda, which plays on sentiments, must be reinforced by action. Action “produces new attitudes and thus joins the individual firmly to a certain movement” (Ellul 15). Ellul regards nearly all biases messages in society as propaganda, even when the biases are unconscious. Propaganda is instantaneous and destroys one’s sense of history, disallowing critical reflection. The psychological manipulation techniques of propaganda have similar results whether used in Communism, Fascism or Western democracies.

Regarding the effects on public opinion Ellul describes how a vague, undefined popular opinion is, through a process of crystallization, transformed by propaganda into explicit opinion. There is no progression at all from a state of private opinion to a state of public opinion, but from a sate of public opinion to another state of that same public opinion. Propaganda separates private opinion from public opinion. Public opinion assumes a rigidity and intensity that makes private opinion impossible. Mass media serves public opinion, excluding private opinion. Propaganda uses emotional shock to produce an ideological elaboration that becomes crystallization. Crystallization takes place at certain points, if one can harden opinion on a certain key point, one can control an entire sector of opinion from there. Once opinion has crystallized, even a proved fact cannot do anything against it. Since public opinion cannot exist without simplification, propaganda simplifies complex issues. To that end the creation of stereotypes helps in narrowing the field of thought and angle of vision of the individual. The variety of everyday attitudes in society is reduced to a polarity of positive and negative, propaganda placing anyone with more differentiated opinions into one group or the other (Ellul 207-212).

Propaganda must have a collective influence if it is going to lead an individual to action, to that end must create a strong integration of the group, activating its preoccupations “when the group acquires certain uniformity it will inevitable experience the need for action” (Ellul 210), then the public and its opinion is transformed in an acting crowd. Propaganda makes the individual feel the urgency for some action, then shows him what to do. In order to be effective, propaganda must convince the individual of the success of his action, possible reward or satisfaction. By example, the individual would be lead to action. In a group without a leader, but subjected to propaganda, the psychological and sociological effects are the same as if it were a leader (Ellul 207-212).