“The easiest way to propagandise people is to let a propaganda theme go in through an entertainment picture when people do not realise they are being propagandised.”

— Elmer Davis

While growing up as a child in the Caribbean my mind and my attitude concerning the United States, like those of countless millions of people around the world, were shaped by American propaganda.

They were influenced and moulded perhaps more so by Hollywood movies, by American popular music, by books, by comics and other reading material, and by toys rather than by the news media sources like Voice of America, and then, much later on, by the cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News via satellite technology. And though we tend to think of propaganda in nefarious terms, used in a nation’s or in a political entity’s attempts at spreading misinformation — putting a positive spin on what is patently negative and destructive — propaganda is not always deleterious or destructive in its intent.

For example, although it is patently flawed and indubitably misleading at times, this writer is of the opinion that American propaganda has done much to extol the precepts and the virtues of the political ideology of liberal democracy. But what of American political propaganda as we had come to experience it before the advent of the current US Federal Government Administration, which, ostensibly, has a completely different idea of patriotism than that of Superman’s iconic motto of ‘Truth, Justice, and the American Way’, linking him to American ideals? Is it now a thing of the past or has it taken a completely different track?

With the gutting of Voice of America, and with the attacks on USAID and USDA by the current US Administration — entities which comprised a part of what is understood as “soft diplomacy”, used to win over the minds and hearts of others in the world to our way of thinking without the use of bullets and bombs — what now is our new modus operandi and, equally so, what now is our message to the world?

Are we still trying to make an argument in respect to American liberal democracy, or is our message now couched in a sort of white-flag acquiescence through which we are saying to the dictators and to the totalitarian regimes around the world that they were right all along about their way of living and that we now, collectively, as a people, are repentant of our once-vaunted sense of humanity and justice and ready to zealously and wholeheartedly join their ranks and their causes after 300 years away from monarchical tyranny towards the wanton abuse and the unbridled exploitation of our citizens? What now sets us apart from such awful political systems and from the cultures of callous brutality on which they were built?

Both “good” and “bad” propaganda — which, at times, seeks only to put a people’s best foot forward to others abroad, often hiding inconvenient truths, at the expense of being honest about scandalous skeletons which can be found in the closets of history — tend to operate on the tried and the proven practice of saying and doing things enough until myth, as in the hands of medieval alchemists, eventually turn into reality, embraced by a gullible populace.

And some might ask: What is the fear of half-truths if their propagation leads mostly to positive results — that is, the ends have justified the means? This writer is no expert on the philosophical or the ethical challenges posed by situational ethics in such regard, but it seems to me that such positive mind-controlling agendas can become completely undone by destructive beliefs and habits which helped to shape and sustain a nation, which propaganda often chose to overlook. And it appears that that is now the case with the United States, as has been the experience of other nations before it in the world, especially in those which view the idealism of liberal democracy as anathema.

Racism and misogyny are cases in point, in terms of vices, which our message to the world tends to omit. Despite cultural shifts which resulted in amendments to the US Constitution, both as an acknowledgement of such vices and an attempt to address them in real terms on a national scale, too many open wounds were left by the reformers to be pronounced as healed by American progeny, as in the case of those who had presented themselves to the Jewish priests at the temple in Jerusalem in ancient Israel as lepers touched by the hand of providence in order to confirm their miraculous healing from that medical condition. Sometimes the proverbial skeletons in the closet, those which were said to be non-existent or dead and buried, appear to come back to life to bite nations in their proverbial posteriors.

This writer is willing to tolerate, although not recommend, the rationale behind political ideological propaganda, especially when it tends towards achieving some degree of good, as in the case of the espousal of liberal democracy. But if we shoot for the sky using a shaky foundation, then we may end up losing not only what we aspire for but also everything which we had already thought that we had achieved.

And with this in mind I reviewed some of the glorious propaganda creative pieces that were produced by Hollywood and broadcast worldwide, much to the ire of dictators and totalitarian regimes on one hand, and much to the hope, courage, and resilience of their people, in terms of wanting and working towards throwing off such yokes of exploitation, oppression, humiliation, and misery, on the other.

What do we now do with All the President’s Men, the famous book about the Watergate scandal, written by investigative journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the story for
The Washington Post, detailing their efforts to uncover the truth behind the Nixon Administration’s involvement, which was made into a movie in 1976?

What do we now do with such soul-stirring patriotic movies as the late Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, which came out in theatres in 1992, and The American President, which came out in 1995? What of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October (1990); Patriot Games (1992); Clear and Present Danger (1994); and The Sum of all Fears (2002)?

America, in all those films, even with some of them acknowledging US national vices, still came across as “the good guys”. But exchanging love letters with a North Korean leader; siding with Russia after an illegal and unprovoked military invasion; actively supporting genocide in The Middle East and firing missiles at small, unarmed fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea all seem to be grossly antithetical to the ideas which inspired such films.

Do we continue to work in order to make our patriotic myths become reality in the hearts of the people of the world, or do we now chuck it all in and set everything ablaze? Have our lies and our true selves finally caught up with and overtaken us? Perhaps American philosopher Eric Hoffer was right when he said: “Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”

Reprinted from the December 26, 2025 edition of Public Opinion, the fortnightly thought leadership online publication. publicopinion.news

Al Murray