Propaganda

There are points in the text where the author seems to be very careful about emphasizing the completely benign activities of the invisible government, while at other times, he portrays these shadowy entities in deliberately ominous terms. What are some examples and evidence of this narrative device? If you think the author’s depictions of the invisible government are inconsistent, explain why.

What points in the text did you find evidence of the author’s elitism? If you detected obvious elitism, then did this detract from his argument? What is the correlation between Bernays’s elitism and his ambiguity about democracy?

What is the most prominent scientific or technical language register that you detected in the text? What purpose does this stylistic flair serve? How does the technical language register add or detract meaning from the text?

Do you find any evidence that this book is not just a book about propaganda but deliberately propaganda itself? What evidence have you found to make that claim? Which, if any, rhetorical flourishes or literary devices led you to suspect that the book was propaganda?

Please discuss the different descriptions of the invisible government in the text and then compare these depictions with the two references to invisible government activities, both of which occur on Page 34. The first is with regard to the “poker table in a certain little green house,” and the second details “half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room.”

What are Bernays’s views on free speech? What does he mean when he uses the phrase “democratic doctrine”? If you lived in a country where the invisible government was not a myth, would you consider said country a democracy? Explain.

What is the purpose of the latter chapters in the book, all of which are quite short in length? Did these chapters seem performative? How did these short chapters add to or corroborate the author’s argument?

Bernays addresses possible critics of his propaganda with disparaging terms. Is that narrative function something you have come across previously in non-fiction texts? What is your opinion regarding the effectiveness or insightfulness of Bernays’s response to the imaginary critic?