Strategic Communication, Corporatism, and Eternal Crisis by Phil Graham

Author:Phil Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

Communication would thereafter be central to management theory, strategy, and practice, and would form part of corporate, government, and all forms of human organisation from that point onwards (Dixon, 1996).

National Spectacle and the Arts of Mass Confusion

Josef Goebbels was without doubt a genius of propaganda. His approach to propaganda is revolutionary for its integration of technology, culture, history, architecture, and all forms of art. Facts would be what he said they were. He understood that deep emotion lay at the heart of successful propaganda and that all and any media forms could be infused with the emotions necessary to the organisation of mass attitudes (Bullock, 1991, p. 440). Goebbels’ achievements as a propagandist are legion, but his emphasis on art and emotion is historically new. He went well beyond Creel’s dedication to the organisation of factual matter to aim at an overwhelmingly emotional engagement of the German people. He managed to build an hysterical cult of hero worship to a degree that was unique up to that point in history and would not be repeated until Beatlemania in the 1960s.

By the end of WWII, propaganda and counterpropaganda techniques had been worked out on all sides of the conflict. They had become self-promoting. Organisers of war would move into private enterprise and take the techniques for organising war and war propaganda with them. Private enterprise would continue to influence a continually weakened state, both through the “revolving door” mechanism and through the mass employment of “consultants”. Combined with scientific management of organisations, and the rise of new communication technologies that gave international corporations facility to organise on a global scale, the finely honed propaganda techniques developed for campaigns of mass destruction would now be fought against in grade school during media literacy lessons (New London Group, 2010); in popular critiques such as those by Hermann and Chomsky, Pilger, and Moore; or in less accessible parts of the academy focused on critical studies of mass media and communication.1 Long-range air transport demonstrated it could traverse the globe non-stop by 1957, in an airborne repeat of Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet”, “sending a message” that the United States could drop nuclear ordnance anywhere in the world. Every such move thereafter would “send a message” in response.

In 1961, communication went extra-terrestrial with the launch of Telstar, and the “space race” began as part of a decades-long Cold War in which published numbers of nuclear weapons, the goods available to the average citizen under each system, belligerent posturings such as the Bay of Pigs incident, and wars of political ideology such as those waged in Korea and Vietnam were all part of an ongoing international propaganda campaign. Each belligerent act, each technological achievement, and each social failure became part of a calculated system of “sending a message” from one side to the other. War would become “branded”. Jonathan Auerbach notes that the PR firm that absorbed Carl Byoir’s firm, Hill and Knowlton, was paid $12 million to promote the 1990 US-led invasion of Iraq (2015, p. 165).

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