Phil Agre of the Red Rock Eater's deconstruction of Election 2000 truth-slaying attacks by Republican operatives and their dupes on the Internet is required reading for anyone who wants to understand Internet propaganda techniques:
http://www.spectacle.org/1200/agre.htmlAgre analyses the abuses of Projection, which Republicans and right wingers--actually any ideologue who has an any-means-necessary compulsion to advance the cause--are particurly apt to fall into using. Whereas most people think of propaganda as a conscious choice to deceive, projection is more insidious. If it were conscious, it would be something like the Situationist idea of détournement--taking a popular icon and subverting it to mean something opposite, much as Ad Busters does with corporate brands. But it isn't conscious. Here's how Agre describes it:
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Several people have asked me where they can read more about the role of projection in politics. It would seem that we are stuck with it. The answer is, I don't know of any political works that discuss the role of projection, which I find surprising given what I perceive as overwhelming dominance of projection in contemporary political discourse. The best book about projection that I know, at least the best for a general audience, is Robert Bly's "A Little Book on the Human Shadow" (Harper and Row, 1988). Bly uses the Jungian word "shadow" instead of "projection", but that doesn't mean you have to buy the totality of Jung's theories. The idea is that people who disown parts of themselves thereby acquire a "shadow": the disowned parts are still real and active, but they operate secretively, under the cover of a darkness that one creates by dimming one's own consciousness. Some people disown the weak parts of themselves, or the emotional parts, or even (as in George W. Bush's case) the intelligent parts. Faced with the problem of getting rid of these parts of themselves, people often project those disowned, negatively valued parts into other people. Someone who has homosexual feelings, for example, might choose to disown them, project them, and thereby develop a hatred for homosexuals. This is perhaps one reason why conservative operatives are so often discovered to have hidden lives.
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Anyone who has debated a winger about Election 2000 will surely have come across projection. Just think of all those nuts out there who apparently believe with all their "hearts" and "souls" that Al Gore tried to steal the election. This is a very common propaganda tool, and it's particularly dangerous because it infests its host. The employer of this tool is not in control of it. It is in control of him or her.
Note: This post was inspired by a thread in the Lounge on "Favorite Propaganda Techniques. The whole article cited above is very much worth reading, as are Agre's other pieces on the degeneration of political discourse in the US.
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