Thread: When does it become unacceptable propaganda?

I am writing about a preacher and a gardener who have telepathic contact, the gardener is deliberately converting the preacher by allowing him to read his thoughts and see things from another’s viewpoint. There are no arguments, the nearest I come to presenting the other view is to present the preacher’s original way of seeing things and his sermons and conversion.

Of course every author presents their own view of the world and in some way propagandises it. “To kill a Mockingbird” is ‘good’ propaganda, “Swallows and Amazons” is subtle propaganda, John Buchan is Imperialist propaganda, George Orwell, socialist, we all choose which story to present and that is part of what makes a classic book, but at what stage does it stop being a good yarn and become unacceptable propaganda?

Other than when it’s for the other side.

It's propaganda when the story is buried in the message instead of the other way around.

To Kill a Mockingbird leads you to think about several issues including racial prejudice, the heartbreak of lonliness, how Truman Capote came to be the way he was. It achieves it power through understatement and realism. The messages are not shouted in our face, but are delivered by describing people and events we can believe in as part of the real world.

When does it become unacceptable propaganda?


In reply to Olly's question. I grew up just south of a Navajo Reservation. My community was sixty percent hispanic and forty percent white. The entire community was in decline because Congress had taken the passenger rail from our town. As a result, hotels, restaurants, an ice plant and a bottling plant had closed. Yet, in high school, I was required to read To Kill a Mockinbird and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

The teacher who required us to read these books was white. He and his wife were committed to the community and students, but what they didn't get was-requiring us to read these books was in your face propaganda. We were already poor. We dealt with racial issues by getting along, for the most part. The group fights weren't racial, it was ranchers Vs. stoners. The ranchers were hard working people. The stoners had chosen to be parasites. As such, they resented hard working folk-who by the way were as poor as 99.9% of the community.

I deeply resented having to read these books. The teachers thought I was over reacting. I would've preferred doing a book report on a subject of my choosing, and had these two teachers checked, they would've found out that I had read over 90 perecent of the books in the children's section of the library and fifty perecent of the books in the adult section. I was so bored, I even read technical manuals.

There teachers weren't trying to expand my mind, they were trying to impress their liberal bias onto me.

garza, I think I might be writing propaganda by your definition. I started the project when I looked at what the most popular categories of books were, gardening cooking and religion. My cooking is lousy enough that I felt I had best leave that alone and set about trying to combine the other two, I am trying to preach tolerance, something that seems to be often lacking in religion.
The preacher sits down to write a sermon and picks up the thoughts of the old man in the garden, the sermon becomes subtly changed, eventually he loses patience with his exploitative pentecostal church and starts his own. But there is hardly any story, basically simply a background for a series of observations, sermons and essays.

Dudester, You address something that I have always thought to be a problem, namely required reading. Ramming things down people's throats was not the original author's intent and those teachers did no favours to Harper Lee by doing it, you were obviously an avid reader, they should have facilitated your discovery of the books maybe, that's what good teacher's do, facilitate discovery. But I am more concerned at the moment with the writing, how it is used when it is released to the world is beyond our control.
Your remark about the Navajo reservation is interesting. When I was a small boy we had a visitor, Elma Udall, who was a distant cousin from Arizona. She was working in the London American embassy and grew up alongside Navajo, I was fascinated by a turquoise and silver Thunderbird necklace they had given her I remember. She became a firm family friend and started a long term interest in things Navajo for me.

Dudester - It's interesting that what I see as a realistic story that leads to critical thinking about social issues without shouting, you see as 'in your face propaganda'.

One reason for the difference may be cultural background. I grew up in south Mississippi. Every character in To Kill a Mockingbird is a picture of someone I knew as a child. Every incident in the book is an incident that could have happened in the town where I was born and lived for the first 16 years of my life. So from my viewpoint there's nothing forced on the reader. Harper Lee recreated the real world filled with pictures of real people and let the lessons be there, unforced, as the scenes play themselves out in the pages of the book.

While I was in high school I was a fan of Truman Capote's writing. When you read about Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird, and you know of the connection, that Harper Lee was probably the only girlfriend, maybe the only friend at all, that the young Capote had among other children, the ideas presented in such works as Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany's come into sharper focus. Of course I was jealous of Capote. At 17 I was writing articles carried by a dozen newspapers in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana and I thought that was pretty good for a first-year university student. But at 17 Capote was already working for the New Yorker. Quite a difference. I was a hack writer and he was already getting famous as a teen-ager. But now I think about it, while I've never had the fame and fortune Capote had, I've lived far longer and have probably enjoyed life more than Capote. (File that under Sour Grapes.)

The neighbourhood where I lived the first seven years of my life was a black and white neighbourhood. Whites lived along 22nd Avenue, blacks lived in the section houses along the L and N railroad tracks. With few white kids nearby, the section kids were the only kids to play with. I didn't know we were different until we started going to school. It was a puzzle. Why couldn't we go to the same school? It wasn't fair. So when, years later, I came to read about Tom Robinson's trial as seen through the eyes of Scout (Harper Lee), I saw the same unfairness in the book that I had seen as a child in real life. The book dosen't preach, it dosen't need to. The picture it paints is sufficient to get the message across.

You say you would have preferred doing a book report on a subject of your choosing. Of course you would have. We all would have preferred that as children and maybe even as adults. But if all we ever read were the books of our own choosing, there would be little or no point in going to school at all. Our minds would never have to face different ideas, different opinions, different ways of thinking. In short, there would be nothing to expand our minds.

Olly, your story will always be deemed unacceptable propaganda by those who read it who have the same mindset as your preacher character.

To Kill a Mockingbird is not liberal propaganda. Racism is not conservative, and neither is inequality or injustice.

we all choose which story to present and that is part of what makes a classic book, but at what stage does it stop being a good yarn and become unacceptable propaganda?

But isnt it all relative to the writer and reader? Which means, you cant know what will be unacceptable to others because some will think so and some wont.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, isnt it more important for you as the writer to follow your own morals regarding your story and leave thoughts about whether the content/subject is acceptable or not for others to worry about? Because, you can never please everyone all the time and if you spend all said time trying to conform to what you think others consider acceptable, you'll be forever running round in circles and never getting anything said or done.

If that makes any sense at all?

Der Giftpilz is unacceptable propaganda.

Just tell the kids the truth: that we have been killing one another from day one, and that they focus on doing things different from the previous generation. Maybe, with some hope and luck, one generation will really change, and the world will become a peaceful place for all.

A professor's personal views doesn't belong in the classroom. In a pub after school into the ear of a friend will be an ideal place to unload any garbage.


Hey, teacher, leave the kids alone.

As we've already seen in this post, propaganda is in the eye of the beholder and anything might be considered propaganda by someone. As we've also seen already, there could be some situational justification, or at least rationalization, for those appraisals. I think the question as posed is probably a false dichotomy, given the pejorative response most people seem to have to the word propaganda. There is another question though (and another sense of propaganda) and perhaps one should rather ask how much didactic exposition can be legitimately contained in a work of supposed prose fiction? This is still a fairly subjective question but I think the answer is probably, rather a lot. There are after all quite a lot of readers out there and if even a tiny but faithful minority of them can stomach a bit of consideration with their pablum then one might be okay if their work is otherwise of sufficient quality. I'd say there is even some evidence that a tiny but sufficient fraction actually demand thoughtful consideration in the work they seek out. I think of a work like Robinson's Mars Trilogy which is nothing really except a massive and encyclopedic compendium of commentary on science and politics and economy and philosophy beaded on a thin string of science fiction plot. The author isn't exactly evenhanded in his views although that's somewhat offset by his exhaustiveness. This article doesn't mention any sales figures for the books, but it's in all the libraries and has awards and I suspect Robinson is doing okay with it. It might be worth mentioning that I don't personally find Robinson a very good author literarily or find his story particularly spellbinding but read him anyway for his engrossing ability to elucidate and interlock so many important phases of contemporary thinking in a work supposedly fictive. If a work is able to embody this in some way, then I think the question of being legitimate fiction disappears and it's not impossible that it would find a sufficient audience.

We might say then that the work becomes objectionable propaganda when the reader deems it so. Thus in my mind To Kill a Mockingbird is a skillfully written story evocative of a place and time which I know well, while to Dudester it's 'in your face propaganda'.

Originally Posted by garza

We might say then that the work becomes objectionable propaganda when the reader deems it so. .

So in 1935 Mein Canpf was a damned good read with some interesting ideas? By that reckoning propaganda only becomes objectionable when it is unsuccessful, I think? Perhaps we should define "objectionable".

Except Mien Comp wasn't written as fiction with an underlying message. It was written for the sole purpose of promoting a political ideology. I don't see what that has to do with the OP.

While I wouldn't disagree with your second sentence, Joseph, I am not sure that it precludes the first.

Mein Kampf, available in English translation here, is part autobiography, part reflections on history, and part political manifesto. It is more interesting than its detractors have always claimed, and makes very clear both the foundation of National Socialist thought and the expected result of the struggle Hitler intended leading for the conquest of Europe. There is no hidden message. The title itself, My Struggle in English, tells us what to expect.

A novel with the message more 'in your face' than To kill a Mocking Bird is Grapes of Wrath. Lee's portrayal of racial discrimination and its subordinate issues of domestic violence, social ostracism, and homosexuality is quite subtle by comparison. Steinbeck's portrayal of human degradation fueled by greed is not subtle. Many people, including some who agreed with the message, found the novel objectionable.

As a youngster I was forbidden to carry copies of Faulkner's novels to school. They were regarded as subversive, written solely to undermine the traditional Southern way of life. The loudest condemnation came from those who'd never read Faulkner. This is often true of books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and others that weave social messages in with the story.