'A far more frightening work than any of the nightmare novels of George Orwell. Propaganda is a kind of invisible glue that holds a modern technological society together in various ways dictated by many different kinds of sources including political, economic, spiritual, cultural, nationalistic often oppositonal.

It can be 'very difficult to determine what constitutes propaganda in our world and what the nature of propaganda is. 'Propaganda thus displaces and liberates feelings of aggression by offering specific objects of hatred to the citizen.' 'I could give a hundred examples of complete distortion of facts by competent and honest journalists, whose interpretative articles appear in serious newspapers. 'About 90 percent of the population is 'politically inert' they become active only accidentally, when they are set into motion, but they are normally 'inactive, inattentive, manipulable, and without critical faculty'

It operates instead with many different kinds of truth- half truth, limited truth, truth out of context. But modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. Most people are easy prey for propaganda, Ellul says, because of their firm but entirely erroneous conviction that it is composed only of lies and 'tall stories” and that, conversely, what is true cannot be propaganda. Only in the technological society can there be anything of the type and order of magnitude of modern propaganda, which is with us forever and only with the all-pervading effects that flow from propaganda can the technological society hold itself together and further expand. Propaganda exists and thrives it is the Siamese twin of our technological society. The principal difference between his thought edifice and most other literature on propaganda is that Ellul regards propaganda as a sociological phenomenon rather than as something made by certain people for certain purposes. Jacques Ellul’s view of propaganda and his approach to the study of propaganda are new.

Propaganda book by jacques ellul