Tea at Trianon: Propaganda in the Twentieth Century

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 23, 2022

Propaganda in the Twentieth Century

From Frank Wright:

The Twentieth Century began with a great vanity, one which continues to this day. It birthed a movement - Modernism - which was the result of the enthusiasm and exhilaration felt at obvious and rapid technological advances conflated with an idea of the elevation of mankind. This is at base the superstition known as Progress, the assumption that as our machines become better, so do we.
We shall see in the course of this piece that the machine of propaganda did indeed get better. Alongside the obvious use of modern art, the successes of the Nazi Party and the striking use of Socialist Realism in the USSR was the development of a tremendous fusion of marketing and the distorted personality cult of psychoanalysis. This unholy amalgam gave us the remarkable career of Edward Bernays, whose methods gave rise to the contemporary system of desire delivery we call the mass media.
The tremendous success of this machinery is to have mechanised human life, organising the selves it manufactured according to its own preferred signals. We are, in essence, positively adjusted to a system of traffic lights. Our inner lives are syncopated by digitised signals. We go and stop and pause on command, and we have no direction without them. (Read more.)