heretical.com


Applied Propaganda Techniques


The Language of Politics




It is an axiom of economic warfare that the surest way of destroying a country is to debase its currency; for example, by flooding it with counterfeit money. It is no less true that the surest way of destroying a nation’s culture and identity is to debase its language. Not surprisingly, therefore, subversive agencies are giving the highest priority to the corruption of the English language. These ‘semantic forgers,’ all in the course of promoting their odious political correctness, are at work in our schools and colleges, in central and local government, in publishing houses and throughout the mass media. In the process they are seeking to make certain words as unacceptable as counterfeit money, to alter the traditional meaning and value of other words, and to introduce new terms serving their own perverse ideology. (George Orwell prophesied as much in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the official language was ‘Newspeak.’)

The process is insidious and potentially deadly; accordingly we must exercise the utmost vigilance and ruthlessness in arresting its progress, just as we would have to remove all counterfeit money from circulation in order to safeguard the value of our material assets. And let no one dismiss the matter as ‘just words’; words are the vehicles of thought, and thought governs most of our lives in one way or another.

As with counterfeit money or goods, we must be alert enough to detect the attempted fraud at – and preferably before – the point of sale, or else we soon find ourselves a good deal poorer. Accordingly, the aim of these notes is to sharpen this vigilance and help drive the counterfeiters and all their worthless productions out of our national life. But first we need to review the ways in which people’s thoughts, speech and behaviour can be influenced by propaganda.

Elements of Propaganda

Propaganda is intended to alter the way people think and feel about the society they live in and its governing values and priorities. In order to do this it resorts to the following tactics:




‘Newspapers have to sell in order to live; so does commercial TV. That leaves the BBC as the only truly public service medium in this country disseminating information, entertainment and, in the case of race relations, propaganda. We are unashamed to admit it is what we are doing.’

Gerry Hines, BBC Programme Organizer quoted in Race Today




‘Television lies. All television lies. It lies persistently, instinctively and by habit. Everyone involved lies. A culture of mendacity surrounds the medium, and those who work there live it, breath it and prosper by it. I know of no area of public life – no, not even politics – more saturated by a professional cynicism. If you want a word that takes you to the core of it, I would offer rigged.

‘...is it dishonest for the presenter to imply that the pundit in the chair is free to offer any opinion, when the truth is that fifty pundits were telephoned, but only the fellow prepared to offer the requisite opinion was invited?’

Matthew Parris, London Daily Mail, 21 April 1996




      Main Directory      

–– The Heretical Press ––