What is Propaganda?
The widely understood propaganda has accompanied the political and social history of mankind for thousands of years. It is because most of the ancient rulers have taken care of the fact that his every victory and conquest was made public (for example the triumphs of the Roman emperors). Also, in the most of other cases, when the city threatened to be invaded, the authorities presented to the citizens their visions of the most frightening ruthlessness and cruelty, hoping thereby to mobilize residents to take part in a heroic defense of the city walls. According to a similar pattern, the papacy has worked, in a way of encouraging medieval knights to take part in the crusades against the Muslims – this is what is called propaganda. According to the dictionary definition, this term comes from the Latin word "propagere”, which means to “expand, promote” and indicates the intentional action to shape the views or behavior of the given group, which is addressed. It is based on the emotional and intellectual persuasion. There are two main types of propaganda – informational, which uses reliable information and persuasive, which aims to influence the decision of a specific recipient. In the modern world, propaganda accompanies people almost everywhere and can take a variety of art forms, such as photography, film, music, body language and literature. It is widely used in television, radio, newspapers and on the Internet, where advertising is found to be its most sophisticated form. By having the knowledge of the powerful impact of propaganda, many leaders for decades have developed it nearly to perfection. The leaders of totalitarian regimes, such as communism (Lenin and Stalin) as well as fascism (Mussolini and Hitler), who, by the skillful use of persuasion and manipulation, were able to convince their countrymen to unimaginable sacrifices and to imprint them even the most absurd ideologies.
Propaganda of Success
The propaganda of success is a type of propaganda exaggerating the successes of the leaders. All of the problems are minimized, and the responsibility for them is put on the previous team, the enemy forces and so on. To some extent, all rulers cultivate the propaganda of success, but its usually effective counterweights are the free media, which not only present a different view of the government, but also take care of and highlight the failures rather than government’s successes. Successfully grown propaganda of success can leave a positive opinion among the people about a given era, which overall was not considered to be so good. Ferdinand Marcos, on whom I would like to focus on my website, used the propaganda of success.
