What propaganda is, and what it is not

Series: How minds are moved · Foundations: how persuasion works · 1 of 7

In 1622 Pope Gregory XV set up a committee of cardinals to spread the Catholic faith in lands it had not yet reached. He called it the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the congregation “for propagating the faith”. For most of three centuries it was mainly a church word, with no shame in it. Then came the First World War, and within one generation it became an insult. Today we use it for anything we think is false. That is a mistake, and the mistake makes us easier to move.

Contents · 10 sections

TL;DR #

• Propaganda is organised communication that aims to make people act, or accept, in a way chosen in advance. It is not the same thing as lying.
• Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda (1962) gives the most useful map: agitation propaganda stirs people up for a short burst, while integration propaganda quietly keeps them in line, all day, every day.
• Most effective propaganda uses true facts. In Ellul’s words, the “necessary falsehoods” are in “intentions and interpretations”, where they are hardest to catch.
• Education does not protect you by default. Ellul thought intellectuals were among the most exposed.
• The practical question is not “is this true?” but “who organised this, and what do they want me to do?”

Why this series, and how I make it #

This post opens a series called How minds are moved. It is about propaganda, social engineering, fake news, fact-checking and censorship: what they are, how they feel from the inside, what they can make people do and what they cannot. I do not want to tell you what to believe. I want to describe the mechanisms and the documented cases, from every direction, so that you can judge for yourself. I write it together with my AI and my systems: my local AI agent, lsn-agent-v3, reads with me through my library, my news engine LSN News measures how stories travel in dozens of languages, and my honeypots show me what attackers actually try. The judgments and the mistakes are mine.

What propaganda is #

There are dozens of definitions. The one I find most useful comes from the French sociologist and law professor Jacques Ellul, a former Resistance member who spent his life writing about technology and freedom. His book Propagandes (1962), published in English as Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is not in my library as a book, but the library holds its encyclopaedia entry and works that build on it.

Ellul’s main idea is simple and uncomfortable. Modern propaganda, he says, is less about changing what you think than about getting you to act, or to go along. In his words, its aim “is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action”. It wants participation, not belief. You do not need to be convinced that a war is just. You only need to stop objecting, buy the bond, fly the flag, share the post.

He also insisted that propaganda is not the trick of one regime. It is a product of mass society itself: big populations, weak local ties, a flood of news, and organisations (states, parties, companies, movements) that need large numbers of people to move in the same direction. Every side builds it, because every side needs it.

Agitation and integration #

Ellul sorted propaganda into pairs of opposites. The pair that matters most is agitation versus integration.

Agitation propaganda is the loud kind. It pulls people out of their normal lives and pushes them towards a goal that suddenly seems within reach: overthrow this, stop that, punish them. It runs on anger and hope, and it uses short slogans. It cannot last long, because nobody can stay at that temperature for months. Revolutions, campaigns and the first weeks of a war run on it.

The darkest documented case is Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994, which called Tutsi “cockroaches” and read out names and places. In 2003 the UN tribunal for Rwanda convicted two of its founders and the editor of the newspaper Kangura in what became known as the Media case. Their words were judged to be part of the genocide.

Integration propaganda is the quiet kind, and Ellul thought it was the more important one. It does not stir you up. It settles you down. It keeps you inside the normal pattern of your society: what a good life looks like, what a good citizen does, what is too silly to discuss. It is long term, it is everywhere, and it does not feel like propaganda at all. Advertising, school textbooks, films, national holidays and the tone of the evening news all carry it. Ellul’s point was that much of it is not even planned. A society produces it simply by talking about itself.

Romanians who grew up before 1989 saw both kinds. Cântarea României, the national festival that ran from 1976 to 1989, was integration propaganda on a national scale: hundreds of thousands of amateur performers, every factory and village choir praising the Party and its leader, year after year. Nobody was expected to believe every line. Everyone was expected to take part. In December 1989 the same television that had sung the anthem of the “Golden Age” became, within hours, the voice of the revolution. That was agitation, live.

The same split exists in Western democracies. A Romanian manual of political marketing in my library, Bogdan Teodorescu’s Marketing politic și electoral, traces the distinction back to the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov: propaganda gives many ideas to a few people, agitation gives one idea to many. Campaign consultants on every side still work with that distinction, whatever they call it.

Propaganda is not the same as a lie #

This is the part people miss. If you think propaganda means lies, you will look for lies. You will check the facts, find that they are correct, and relax. That is exactly when it works.

Ellul was blunt about this. In the chapter on propaganda and truth he writes that “the truth that pays off is in the realm of facts”, while “the necessary falsehoods, which also pay off, are in the realm of intentions and interpretations”. And then: “This is the realm of the lie; but it is exactly here that it cannot be detected.”

In practice this means:

• The numbers are real, but chosen. One true statistic is put in the headline and another true statistic is left out.
• The event happened, but the story about why it happened, and what it means, is supplied for you.
• The quote is accurate, but the context is gone.
• The enemy’s crime is real, and our own is not mentioned.

My news engine caught a small, honest example of this on 10 November. President Nicușor Dan answered a question about the long-delayed report on Romania’s annulled 2024 election. One outlet, gandul.ro, headlined that he “admits there is no new evidence” of Russian influence. Four hours later capital.ro headlined that “there was evidence of Russian influence”. Both were literally true: he had said evidence was presented a year ago and nothing new had come since. Each newsroom chose which half to put on top. That is not propaganda by itself. It is framing by selection, the raw material that propaganda works with.

The men who ran American propaganda in the First World War said the same from the other side. George Creel, who headed the Committee on Public Information, wrote afterwards that they “did not call it propaganda”, because the word had become associated with deceit in German hands. Their effort, he wrote, was “educational and informative throughout”. He meant it. Every propagandist believes he is just telling the truth well.

Propaganda can lie, of course, and some of the most famous cases are pure invention. But a lie is a risk for the propagandist, because a lie can be exposed. A selected truth almost never can.

What it feels like from the inside #

Agitation feels like waking up. Suddenly things are clear, the enemy is visible, and you are part of something. It is exciting, and it is tiring.

Integration feels like nothing. It feels like common sense, like “everyone knows”, like the obvious way to see things. The sign that you are inside it is that the opposite view does not seem wrong so much as strange, or embarrassing.

Ellul added one more observation that I recognise in myself. Propaganda meets a need in the person receiving it. A modern citizen is asked to have opinions on wars, pandemics, the economy and foreign elections, without the time or the means to study any of them. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions that feel like his own. We are not only its victims; we are its customers.

What it can and cannot do #

Ellul himself put limits on it, and later research agrees.

• It cannot create something from nothing. It works with what is already there: existing fears, hopes, prejudices and myths. It amplifies, it channels, it rarely invents a feeling.
• It works best on the undecided and the half-informed. People with strong, well-founded views are hard to move, and people who pay no attention at all are out of reach.
• It needs an organisation and many channels. One poster changes nothing; a total environment can change a great deal.
• And, against the usual belief, education does not automatically protect. In his introduction to the English edition, Konrad Kellen sums up Ellul’s view that intellectuals are “virtually the most vulnerable of all”: they absorb the most second-hand information, feel obliged to have an opinion on everything, and believe they can judge for themselves.

How to notice it #

A short checklist I use, whatever the source and whatever side it seems to come from:

1. Who organised this message? A person, or an organisation with a goal?
2. What does it want me to do, or to stop doing? Look for the action, not just the claim.
3. Are the facts correct, and what facts are missing next to them?
4. Where is the interpretation? Which sentence tells me why and what it means, and who supplied it?
5. Is it agitation (urgent, angry, now) or integration (normal, obvious, always)?
6. Does the opposite view feel wrong, or does it just feel unthinkable? The second is the stronger sign.

Frequently asked questions #

Is propaganda always bad? #

Not by definition. Public-health campaigns against drunk driving are propaganda in Ellul’s sense: organised, repeated, aimed at behaviour. Whether a given campaign is good depends on its aims and its honesty, which is exactly why the label alone settles nothing.

What is the difference between propaganda and information? #

Information tells you what happened and leaves you free to draw conclusions. Propaganda arrives with the conclusion already attached, and aims at an action. In practice the two are mixed, which is why Ellul said information is the raw material of propaganda.

If the facts are true, how can it be propaganda? #

Because the selection of facts, and the explanation wrapped around them, do the work. Ellul’s line is that the falsehoods live in “intentions and interpretations”, not in the facts.

The lesson #

Stop asking only “is this a lie?” Most of the time it will not be. Ask who organised the message, what it wants you to do, and which part of it is fact and which part is interpretation that someone else wrote for you. That is the habit this whole series tries to build. The next post moves from the outside to the inside: what it actually feels like to be persuaded.