How many times did you hear the word 'rescue' this weekend?
This is the propaganda, the way words worm their way into you
Saturday, my newsfeed on YouTube overflowed with stories about the “rescue” of hostages in Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza.
I put rescue in quotation marks because that was the one word that news outlets overwhelmingly used to describe the military extraction by the Israeli Defense Forces of these four people.
Certainly the people in question were held in captivity and thus can be called captives, hostages, and so forth; and the retrieval of such persons could indeed be called a rescue in that sense. However, the blanket use of the term rescue for what the military executed alarmed me, for two reasons:
‘Rescue’ always has a positive connotation. It is not a neutral term. Thus, put in the context of what the IDF did in Nuseirat, it connotes a sense of overarching positivity to the IDF’s actions without a scintilla of negativity. (I’ll return to the use of this term in a bit.)
The general outline of what the IDF did in Nuseirat was a carbon copy of what they had done in Rafah earlier this year, the same day as the Superbowl. That day, they retrieved two live hostages while leaving more than 60 dead Palestinian people in their wake. The news at the time completely ignored the slain civilians to play up the ‘rescue’ aspect of the operation. If any news outlets did remark upon the dead civilians, it was as an afterthought, days after the initial exuberance had permeated the information space.
So I was highly on guard to this plastering of news thumbnails populating my YouTube feed.
One thing that I have learned from social psychology is the rule of three when it comes to social conformity. One type of social conformity, known as informational social influence, is a phenomenon whereby a person is persuaded to defer to the judgment of others if a significant or substantial number of people with whom they come into contact also accept that information as true. In many instances, this can be common knowledge or received wisdom, as it were, something accepted without question in the broader community.
The rule of three (my shorthand) is a related phenomenon where a person is inclined to believe an unsubstantiated piece of information if at least three people assent to its veracity in unanimous fashion.1 A break in unanimity will disrupt the effect.
That more than a dozen news stories were suddenly appearing in my feed, all using the term rescue, all extolling the IDF and ignoring the civilian casualties, indicated that this was creating a form of social proof, simply by buffeting the information sphere.
So I took the time to curate my feed. I did my best to pluck out any instances of these thumbnails.
My ultimate challenge here is that YouTube treats different platforms differently, so I would go online to remove these thumbnails, but some wouldn’t show up there to allow me to remove them. So they would still scroll by when I viewed YouTube through my cable provider, for example. It was impossible to uproot.
As a backup, I had to resort to another form of inoculation, which is to rebut each and every instance of suspect or dubious information. This is something I learned from a piece on sales resistance. Propaganda is in the final analysis a shadow form of sales, and so the ability to disarm sales techniques can be transferred to neutralizing certain types of propaganda. Hunt and Bashaw, in “A New Classification of Sales Resistance” (1999) state,
“Counterargumentation, a concept within the attitude literature, is defined as ‘a process people employ to protect and maintain attitudes in the face of counterattitudinal persuasive communications[.]’ [William J.] McGuire’s inoculation theory of counterargumentation likens an assault on one’s belief system to a viral attack on an organism.
“Included in one’s belief system are schema that correspond to different situations. According to McGuire, the receiver uses defense mechanisms and must either mentally or verbally resist the persuasion attempt by the sender when the message is counterattitudinal.”2
So each and every instance must be countered in the moment in order to neutralize the sales technique or propaganda advance. Otherwise, it will just seep in.
The challenge here is that all forms of broadcast technology invite a passivity in the viewer to accept the images and sound effects that are directed at him or her. So most viewers do not interrogate the information fed to them from these sources of media and thus they come to incorporate via accumulation these images which, when layered on each other, constitute social proof.
I considered yesterday a minefield of information, tricky terrain to navigate.
Also related to the use of ‘rescue’ is the fact that the word inevitably is associated with the idea of heroics. Thus, the use of the word confers a sense of heroism to the IDF’s actions. This is in the middle of the IDF concomitantly committing a massacre. The very word ‘rescue’ becomes subversive and has the ability to create a nebulous field in the viewer’s mind wherein they cannot distinguish between wholesome heroics and abject war crimes. The two slosh around and become linked.
Victor Klemperer, author of The Language of the Third Reich (1957), wrote of the Nazi’s corruption of the word ‘heroism’ and how that affected an entire generation at its core level, the level of language:
“I have observed again and again how the young people in all innocence, and despite a sincere effort to fill the gaps and eliminate the errors in their neglected education, cling to Nazi thought processes. They don’t realize they are doing it; the remnants of linguistic usage from the preceding epoch confuse and seduce them.
“We spoke about the meaning of culture, of humanitarianism, of democracy and I had the impression that they were beginning to see the light, and that certain things were being straightened out in their willing minds — and then, it was always just around the corner, someone spoke of some heroic behaviour or other, or of some heroic resistance, or simply of heroism per se. As soon as this concept was even touched upon, everything became blurred, and we were adrift once again in the fog of Nazism.
“And it wasn’t only the young men who had just returned from the field or from captivity, and felt they were not receiving sufficient attention, let alone acclaim, no, even young women who had seen any military service were thoroughly infatuated with the most dubious notion of heroism. The only thing that was beyond dispute, was that it was impossible to have a proper grasp of the true nature of humanitarianism, culture and democracy if one endorsed this kind of conception, or to be more precise misconception, of heroism.”3
Klemperer sums up his exploration of the misuse of ‘heroism’ in this way:
“No, the most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions.
“Instead, Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. [...]
“[L]anguage does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.
“If someone replaces the words ‘heroic’ and ‘virtuous’ with ‘fanatical’ for long enough, he will come to believe that a fanatic really is a virtuous hero, and that no one can be a hero without fanaticism. The Third Reich did not invent the words ‘fanatical’ and ‘fanaticism’, it just changed their value and used them more in one day than other epochs used them in years. . . . [Nazi language] changes the values of words and the frequency of their occurrence[.]”4
It disturbs me how overwhelming the use of ‘rescue’ showed up yesterday. No doubt I was affected by the onslaught, despite being proactive about my viewing choices and taking steps to neutralize the effect of this reverberation.
What about those people who weren’t so proactive? What about those who were inundated by the totalizing effect of broadcast media and just allowed that verbiage to flow into the deepest recesses of their consciousness? Do they even recognize, on a visceral level, that more than 270 people died in a way befitting a charnel-house? Do they sense this at all?
This was demonstrated in the revelatory Asch experiment (“Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments” (1952, reprinted in Documents of Gestalt Psychology, 1961), p. 233:
“To gain further understanding of the majority effect, we varied the size of the majority in several different variations. The majorities, whichwere in each case unanimous, consisted of 16, 8, 4, 3, and 2 persons, respectively. In addition, we studied the limiting case in which the critical subject was opposed by one instructed subject. […]
“With the opposition reduced to one, the majority effect all but disappeared. . . . The effect appeared in full force with a majority of three. Larger majorities of four, eight, and sixteen did not produce effects greater than a majority of three.”
Kenneth Hunt and R. Edward Bashaw, “A New Classification of Sales Resistance,” Industrial Marketing Management (1999), Vol. 28, p. 111, paragraph break added for clarity in reading.
Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii (1957 / 2000), pp. 2-3. Athlone Press: New York. Paragraph spacing added for ease in reading.
Klemperer, ibid., pp. 15-16. Emphases and paragraph spacing added.
There is little surprising about this language, if you consider that western societies have racism hard coded into their very fabric.
There are people who matter and non people who don’t count.
That’s the real battle here. The embrace by the west of genocide and brutalisation of Palestine in both Gaza and the West Bank - exposes the sham of these supposed liberal progressive countries.
Powerful, and the rule of three, especially when you (foot)note that the impact plateaus after that, is shocking. I think of Murdoch owning almost all the newspapers here, plus the commercial and national radio that generally follow these narratives and words .. Way more than three. And that awareness of this effect means you would seek to control at least three outlets in every 'market'.
Similarly using words as pejoratives enough times. 'Greenies' comes to mind.
I've been studying and workshoping supremacism language for a long time, particularly from worldviews - that's why markets is in inverted commas - and these quotes from the 3rd Reich study are like handing me a battery to keep going. Irrespective of exhaustion.
Thanks for your persistence and perspective.