Original subtitles

(soft orchestral music)

- «Astronaut» It's beautiful Mike, it really is.

(explosion)

(dramatic orchestral music)

- Propaganda is political brainwashing.

- It's a calculated attack on the complexity

of other people's minds.

- Behold his mighty hands.

- It's the invisible hand.

It's getting you to submit without realizing consciously

that you're submitting.

- What if the media is the enemy of the people.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- Wherever there is power, there is propaganda.

- If we grow up only surrounded by propaganda,

then how do we know what is truth?

- In my line of work you've gotta keep repeating things

over and over and over again,

for the truth to sink in.

- We can take back control of 350 million pounds.

350 million pounds.

- Propaganda is not going to die out.

Propaganda is essential for the modern state.

- How can we protect democracy

from people tampering with the truth?

- The truth about Negroes and foreigners.

- In the wrong hands,

the power of art is a dangerous thing.

(upbeat jazz music)

(muffled speaking)

- «Narrator» We allow ourselves

to be manipulated by fictions,

as though they were uncontestable truths,

as if we cannot distinguish between the two.

- «Man» Okay, can you go back and reshoot it.

I think we have to get it again.

- «Narrator» We have always been captivated

by fairy tales and fantasies,

and the imagery that accompanies them.

But how is it possible that our powers of reason

have so often been overtaken by the irrational?

- If we look back at the history of humankind,

language is a medium

that provided humans

with a new kind of power.

The power of grasping

the symbolic layer of reality.

If we look back at the history of magic, art, religion,

they all share the same roots.

(eerie electronic music)

- This is one of the hand stencils

that El Castillo Cave is famous for,

and the hand stencil is probably the first

symbolic piece of art we find,

representing something in the real world.

This is done with a great deal of care.

The location is deliberately chosen.

This is not just art for art's sake,

this is meaningful art.

To know that they are the hands neanderthal,

that 65,000 years ago,

the neanderthal stood there and made this symbol,

it's mind-blowing.

This is the origin of symbolic culture,

it's the origin of art if you like,

and that plays a really important role in propaganda.

symbolic communication lies at the heart of propaganda.

And there are maybe 40 of these hand stencils in this area.

So when we see large concentrations of art like this,

maybe it was designed to be viewed

by a large number of people,

by gatherings of individuals,

perhaps performing some kind of ritual.

This is public art if you like.

- Great propaganda exploits your need to believe something,

your need for belief,

and your craving or your appetite

for a magical form of empowerment.

We will at this point lose our relative

insignificance in the universe,

and we'll be master of the universe together.

- The shaman takes you into the dark cave,

where you can't see very well and things are flickering,

and pictures of the animal spirits are on the walls.

The caves might be seen as a rather elaborate way

of convincing people of the power of the shaman.

That's propaganda.

- «Narrator» The power of the image

has been with us from the beginning.

Is that why we are so easily seduced by propaganda?

And coerced into adopting opinions that are not our own?

- You are fake news.

- «Narrator» Today we are bombarded with loaded images,

and messages, like never before.

They scream out to us

from our own computers, and cell phones,

as if the dystopian fiction of George Orwell

has become our daily reality.

So how can we defend ourselves

against the inanities of politics?

Of religion?

Of demagogues?

Of rabble-rousing leaders who feed us false hopes,

deception, and hate?

(in foreign language)

When the very concept of truth is being attacked,

when knowledge is debased, and ignorance lauded,

when the rage within every one of us is at a boiling point,

we need to stop and ask ourselves how we got here.

This film is a cautionary tale,

and a call to action,

at a precarious moment in our history.

- We can be manipulated, we can be influenced.

Information is a really powerful thing.

I'm Craig Silverman, I'm the media editor for Buzzfeed News.

Our office in Toronto specializes in

investigating media manipulation,

digital deception, fake news, online misinformation.

- «Interviewer» Let me ask you,

how did you come up with the term, fake news?

- For me, my first encounter

with what I came to call, fake news,

happened in the late summer or the fall of 2014.

I kept coming across stories

that were just completely 100% false,

but they looked like they were published

on a news website.

One of the things that we exposed during the 2016 election

was that there were a group of young men and teenagers,

in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,

who were launching Trump sites.

They had more than 150 that we found,

and they were publishing a lot of stories

that were incredibly misleading,

and many that were also 100% false.

And one of the reasons for that is,

you could make a lot of money from them.

Some of the fake stories that we saw

during the election that did well,

were a story claiming that the Pope had endorsed Trump,

a story claiming that Hilary Clinton

had approved a sale of weapons to ISIS.

They were everywhere.

- Storytelling is a powerful tool

to move people,

it's a powerful tool to engage people.

People want to believe in stories.

Storytelling is embedded in the history of propaganda.

Good propaganda is a good story, it's a good narrative.

There is an enemy,

there is a hero.

And this is how propaganda worked through the centuries.

Taking some specific symbols,

and providing those symbols with supernatural power.

- The use of propaganda to depict

a cult of personality,

we can go right back to Alexander the Great.

Alexander the Great was one of the first leaders

to recognize the importance of the way in which

his presence should be symbolized.

- There's a case to be made for him being

one of the greatest propagandists ever.

He became a god.

That's the point,

and I think he did that consciously.

He was the first person to have to wrestle

with the problem of having a vast empire,

and how do you keep people believing in you?

You can't be everywhere at one time,

so he and his people came up with the idea,

well if Alexander can't be there,

statues of Alexander can be there.

Coins with Alexander's head on them

can go to the ends of the world,

and they will carry the Alexander message.

Believe in me and everything's gonna be fine.

- Propaganda wants to be everywhere.

It is only propaganda when it is part

of a larger endeavor,

of constructing, of engineering reality.

When we don't think it's propaganda,

it works the best as propaganda.

- «Narrator» Arguably the most effective

propagandist in history, has been the church.

Could I ask you about the origin of the word, propaganda?

- The word, propaganda, as we use it in English,

does derive from a Latin term,

and the sense of the original Latin term, is to plant.

The planting of ideas,

it's used in the Catholic church

as a way of describing the process of Evangelization.

You plant, or you seed, the faith.

- At the beginning of the 16th century,

there were maybe 200 printing presses in Europe,

and these would turn out to be the heavy artillery

of the propaganda war that was about to break out.

Martin Luther, and the people who worked with him,

in the reformation,

had a very clear idea of the power of the printing press.

They produced enormous amounts of stuff.

The first bestseller was one of Martin Luther's tracts

about iniquitous seller indulgences.

And he had the idea to use

the services of really good artists,

who did woodcuts, that would go along with his sermons,

railing against the Catholic establishment.

- But then we have first of all, various popes,

trying to counter the propaganda of Protestantism.

- They decided to go right through

the whole means of communication of the Catholic church,

and make it more accessible to the ordinary person.

And that went from painting, sculpture,

architecture, music,

right across the whole spectrum of the arts,

and gave rise to

the glory that is the baroque.

(dramatic orchestral music)

At the heart of any propaganda campaign,

is an emotional appeal of some kind,

some kind of emotional appeal.

The central baroque idea of manipulating the senses,

is playing to the heart, rather than to the mind.

and I'm probably best known as the creator

of the famous, or infamous 1968

red and black Che Guevara poster titled, "Viva Che."

I was working as a barman in a pub in Kilkee,

and in walks Che Guevara.

And of course, being a barman,

you learn to talk to people.

It was one of my gifts.

So he came over near the bar,

and I said, what brings you here?

And he looked at me kind of startled,

and I said, "you're Che," and he said, "yeah."

He said he was in a stopover fog bound,

for two days I think in Shannon Airport.

It left an enormous impression,

because here was somebody I admired hugely.

It was like meeting Martin Luther King.

This was a man I looked at and thought, my God,

the is the real hero of the revolution.

I did many, many versions of the Che,

before I came to the final version,

and here's a couple of them.

As you can see they're over-complicated.

I needed to simplify so I started simplifying.

These are not in sequence.

You can see what I'm up to.

This was one I was going to do as a poster, and didn't,

because that's what he looked like when I actually met him.

Che had been murdered,

executed as a prisoner of war.

Then they committed the most obscene act.

They put him on this thing

for draining the blood from cattle.

And he looked like the dead Christ.

I was so outraged at the manner of his murder,

and the fact that they tried to disappear him,

which has resonance in Ireland, for we had many disappeared,

and we know during the Argentina dirty war

what disappearance meant.

And I thought, **** them, that's not gonna happen.

When I did the Che Guevara image,

I did that deliberately as a piece of propaganda.

I wanted that as simple as possible,

so anybody could copy it.

I made leaflets, I made prints, I gave it to everybody.

I made it free use.

I rather grandly stated that it was to be copyright-free

for all revolutionary and leftist use.

The Che image began to proliferate of its own accord.

I've seen it in the most incongruous places.

I've seen it in toilets in Tokyo.

I've seen it endlessly on T-shirts.

It took off and became so world-famous

it kind of intimidated me.

It got to the point where

I wouldn't even say I did it,

because nobody'd believe you.

I'm very lucky, kind of accidentally,

I created one of the most iconic images of all time,

and I try not to laugh,

because it's a serious image,

but it feels kind of good.

You know, it's nice at my age

to be looking back and thinking,

well I did something decent with my life.

I commemorated a great man, and made him live again.

(grungy music)

- In the first world war,

you have nations fighting in total war.

You don't just have armies,

but you have whole populations

pitted against whole populations.

And as a result of that,

governments have to justify, really for the first time,

on a major scale,

why they are fighting total war,

and that's where propaganda comes in.

(eerie electronic music)

Propaganda is used by all the belligerents.

They used the old media,

the print, posters, et cetera,

but they also used the new technologies,

of in particular the cinema.

(majestic orchestral music)

In stark terms,

many of these stories were perceived

in the immediate aftermath of World War I to be untrue.

And so propaganda in Britain and America,

became firmly associated with lies and falsehood.

Now what's interesting,

is that other countries, like Germany, Italy,

Russia, eventually the Soviet Union,

would actually take a different lesson from

the experiences of the first world war.

They wouldn't see propaganda necessarily

in these negative terms.

(dramatic orchestral music)

(orchestral music continues)

If you look at films, such as, "The Fall of Berlin,"

here you see Stalin depicted in cinematic form.

We have an actor who becomes a national treasure,

who plays Stalin in a number of films.

And plays Stalin as this wise, kind of benevolent figure,

that really sacrifices everything for his country,

and in "The Fall of Berlin," of course,

it's the celebration, it's the apotheosis,

of this wise and benevolent leader.

(in foreign language)

- Long live Stalin!

- Propaganda is something that we cannot bring

our full intelligence to bear on.

So there's something about propaganda,

that actually disables our intelligence.

So we might look back and think,

how could I have believed that?

It's a bit like the end of a love affair, where you think,

how could I have possibly fallen for that person?

The disillusionment over Stalin,

it seems to me is very telling here,

because what it shows us in retrospect,

is how much selective attention

was required to go on believing.

In other words, people had quite actively, if unconsciously,

attacked their capacity for perception and for thought.

It's as though it had never really occurred to them.

And this seemed to me to be an active part of oneself,

that can determinedly not know what one knows.

Propaganda is based on how you stop yourself knowing things.

- Propaganda is something other people consume.

I mean I think that that's

sort of our default definition, right?

We don't go, nobody goes around and says,

my name is Astra, and I love propaganda,

because we all like to flatter ourselves and think,

we don't consume propaganda,

other people do.

If you look at standard histories of propaganda,

what do you see?

You see the Catholic church,

you see the Soviet Union, and Nazi propaganda.

And what's striking to me

about these conventional narratives of what propaganda is,

is how much is left out.

- «Announcer» Adrian knows that for some reason

she doesn't fit into the picture,

but she doesn't know why.

- As a woman in this world I know there are

patriarchal messages, there are sexist messages.

(whistling)

There's no bureau of male affairs,

pushing those from on high,

they're just sort of in the ether,

and being transmitted through the culture,

and we call them stereotypes.

We talk about bias, but we don't use the term, propaganda.

Take a show like "The Bachelor."

- Lauren D.

- «Astra» All these stereotypes are endlessly reinforced.

- Lauren, will you accept this rose?

- For me, when I look around,

and I look at American culture, North American culture,

the stuff that strikes me as the most propagandistic,

is actually the most mainstream culture,

it's the films coming out of Hollywood.

You know like, "She's All That."

Home improvement shows, or real estate shows,

like "House Hunters,"

these things that present

a sort of idealized, consumeristic mode of life.

- Your grand staircase.

How's that make you feel?

- Kind of happy inside.

- The most successful propaganda ever in the world,

has been the propaganda that says,

what you really want is to be rich.

Capitalism creates tremendous envy,

because a lot of people feel extremely deprived,

and resentful, because they're living in a culture

in which it appears as though

1% of the population is enjoying life as it should be lived,

and everybody else is just suffering.

The trouble is, we've been sold

the wrong picture of a good life.

- «Interviewer» What do you see your role to be?

- I see myself as a political guerrilla artist.

What do you call it?

A **** disturber.

I think it's your duty to disturb ****

when you think things are wrong.

I believe something's wrong, and it needs to be changed,

and for some strange reason, the smartest among us,

don't seem to get it.

It's one thing to have an idea,

but what good is the idea if you can't get it out there?

Now, I can have something go from my mind,

to like the Drudge Report, or Glenn Beck, or wherever,

Breitbart, and within 24 hours.

(dark electronic music)

I think the Obama Drone series that I did,

it's basically a celebrity that drones on and on and on

with the public about their politics.

And I kind of figured Hollywood is like the drone base,

for these celebrities that fly out into the country,

and they spread their message.

And of course at the time, Obama had a drone policy,

to where it's like he actually joked about it.

- I have two words for you,

predator drones.

(audience laughing)

- He won a Nobel Peace Prize.

It's like, for God's sakes.

He dropped a bomb every 20 minutes for eight years.

All these political artists,

what were they doing?

They were falling all over themselves

to get in the galleries,

with their ******* wallpaper.

So it's like, you know what?

You had an opportunity to show

that you really spoke against power.

If there's power out there that was being abused,

it was your job as an artist to speak against it.

I'm a Republican, I've always been a Republican.

I'll probably die one.

Here in LA, here in Hollywood,

you're in the closet, you have to wear a mask.

We're the Zorros, we're the heroes,

we're the black sheep, we're punk rock.

It's like the left isn't, the left is establishment.

Over there, over there, over there.

And the left, they control the school systems,

they control Hollywood, they control the music industry.

You name it, they control it.

To which they'll say well, well yeah,

but we have a president that's a Republican,

isn't that the establishment?

No, the establishment is the people

that control the narrative.

And that is a cop.

****, we're ******.

It's really bad when you reach a point in time,

when just telling the truth, is revolutionary.

(uptempo jazz music)

- There are a lot of dangers

to putting work up in public without permission.

I've been arrested 18 times.

(police siren blaring)

Being arrested is never fun,

it's especially dangerous for me as a type one diabetic,

because often I'm not given my insulin in jail,

so it becomes life-threatening.

But, street art is important enough,

for me to take that risk.

It interacts with people where they live their daily lives.

You know what I'm trying to do is,

I'm trying to use the tools that propaganda uses,

and I even call my work, propaganda.

Propaganda has a negative connotation,

but I don't think it has to be negative,

so I'm using the tools of propaganda

in a way that I think is socially responsible.

The Obama Hope poster was like,

lightning in a bottle, perfect storm.

I created the Hope poster as just a grassroots initiative.

But after I made the image,

which originally said, progress,

they found that it caught on very quickly, virally.

- We need (muffled) and we need (muffled).

- The campaign, the Obama campaign,

reached out to me and said, we really like that,

but would you mind using the word hope, or change,

and I liked the word, hope, because I think

during Bush a lot of people felt hopeless,

and without hope people don't act.

The Obama branding was excellent, his logo,

the type choices they made,

but there hadn't been anything with that human connection.

And I'd like to think that beyond just the human connection,

that they way in which I illustrated Obama,

felt patriotic, it portrayed him in a way

that he seemed to have vision, and legitimacy.

His biggest challenge I think was that he was

fairly unknown and unproven in American political life,

so having a two-dimensional sculpture

made of this figure, is a way to legitimize,

and also de-racialize.

That's a big obstacle in the United States, racism.

So illustrating Obama in red, white, and blue,

even though it's not the usual, exact red, white, and blue,

it's American, rather than, African-American.

People are looking back very fondly at that poster,

and it's because they don't want to lose hope.

(dark jazz music)

(children chanting)

- «Narrator» Ai Weiwei has been called,

the most powerful political artist in the world.

A brave and unrelenting critic

of the Chinese authoritarian regime,

he is now in exile,

and a symbol of the struggle for human rights.

- In totalitarian regimes,

what gets erased often is the idea

about who created the art.

Even propagandistic posters for instance that you have

during the cultural revolution.

These are created by people, by individual people,

but what gets erased is their authorship.

The author becomes the state.

And so, the recognition,

the coming to the fore of the individual itself,

is itself a political act.

- «Woman» You have to wait here, please.

(muffled speaking)

- They were aware of the potential of propaganda,

because they were sensitive to the power of art.

Art moved them,

and they knew it could move other people too.

- Art is a powerful means of tapping into the emotions.

There is something very unifying about it,

and transcendent, the feeling of transcendence

is one of the most powerful emotions we can have,

and it can be very dangerous.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- Trump, every picture of him is a revelation, you know.

The sides of his face are interesting,

and the back of his head is fantastic,

and the colors and textures.

There's so much to draw there, you know.

Too bad he is who he is.

I got a lot of these,

but this was when no lawyer would represent him,

so he's in court here getting advice

from his lawyer who is wearing a bag over his head.

Here he is, standing Marilyn-like over a subway grate.

I have no idea what this means.

I've looked at so many pictures.

I slide pictures out of news stories,

and keep a folder, and the folder is very expansive.

I've got a lot of pictures of Trump,

probably 600 pictures of Trump on my desktop.

I mean it's like he's made of rubber, or pudding.

It seems like he's in the process of melting.

Here's a fat joke, here's Trump getting stuck in an MRI,

around the time of his healthcare.

Another healthcare, Trump in traction.

This was just an excuse to draw him, sieg heil, basically.

I'm racked with self-doubt

about what I'm doing half the time,

I am pushing a worldview whether I like it or not, you know.

And cartoonists, there's nothing particularly pure

about what we're doing, I think.

I'm trying for a laugh, basically,

and I will go to depths to get a laugh.

Believe me.

I think Trump would be delighted with some of my drawings,

but I know he didn't like the cover I did,

which was a palm chart of his hand, of his little hand.

And I know Graydon Carter, who is one of the architects

of pointing out Trump's small hands.

That seems like propaganda to me, in a way.

That's part of the propaganda of satire,

because Trump, he doesn't really have

incredibly small hands,

maybe they're a tiny bit out of proportion

for the rest of him,

but it's not anything I would have noticed,

it's a great joke.

That's when I feel like a cartoon

is sort of propaganda itself, or it's pushing a certain,

I mean like Napoleon apparently, didn't do this.

Or Gerald Ford apparently was an athletic guy.

He wasn't a bungling fool,

but satirists fix on one tiny thing,

and if enough of them are doing that,

that becomes the way someone is viewed.

That's taking an untruth,

and making it into an iconic image.

Seems like there's an element of propaganda in that.

I'm trying to get a laugh.

If I can do something funny.

Going for pure outrage is another thing,

and it's got its place, but it's dangerous.

(guns firing)

(murmured conversation)

- A photograph by definition is a lie.

It's a frozen moment in time.

Come stand in here.

We don't know what happened before,

we don't know what happened after.

And also you are getting that story

through my perception.

But this is the thing,

that's what its job is.

The job of art is to be propaganda,

it's to sell something.

My name's Tyler Shields,

I'm a photographer, a director, a writer, and

a lot of people call me provocateur, I guess.

I think a lot of people thought

that we planned it out for months, and done a whole thing.

She wanted to do something with Trump involved,

and her hair stylist was like,

oh I have a wig, I can fashion a wig

that looks like Trump's hair.

And they had a Trump mask.

And so they showed me the mask

and I was like, this looks terrible.

Did you see how it was a fake, like Halloween style,

it was just a fake mask.

And so I was like, okay what can we do with this?

And I said, well if we cover it in blood, it'll hide it.

If I put some blood on it, and then I was like,

oh yeah this works.

It went live on my site, I was asleep.

I wake up,

and it's on TMZ, and it's,

everywhere.

I had the FBI, and the Secret Service, all these people,

and then, Kathy started to get this,

ISIS thing, and she had called me and was like,

people are really mad at me.

I don't know what to do.

- I sincerely apologize,

I am just now seeing the reaction of these images.

- When the whole world is saying, you did this,

and you're career's over,

that's scary to anybody.

- I made a mistake, and I was wrong.

- And then the President tweets about it.

And when he tweeted about it,

that took it to a level that I had never seen before,

and that was all orchestrated.

Apparently there was a whole thing

between Fox News and Trump,

to push all the attention to the Kathy thing,

and take all the attention away from the Paris Accord,

and take all the attention away from all these other things.

It did work.

All the attention to everything was on this photo.

It's genius though.

It's misdirection.

It is all propaganda,

it's all to just keep the hamster wheel going.

The more chaos that you can create in the press,

the less anyone's gonna look at what you're doing.

It's the greatest magic trick ever.

Look at this crazy tweet,

while I **** everything up over here.

It's genius.

And never before in history have you really

had the ability to do that.

Obama was the first president that had social media,

of any type, right?

But he never used it the way that it's being used, now.

Now it's weaponized.

Social media has been weaponized.

(slow rock music)

- Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,

and has Facebook has grown,

people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool,

for staying connected to the people they love,

for making their voices heard,

and for building communities and businesses.

- Facebook, Twitter, Google,

these massive platforms have always pitched themselves

as a level playing field, saying,

everybody come on, share your stuff,

and whatever is the most interesting

and valuable to people will win.

There was always this kind of Utopian element to it.

- It's clear now that we didn't do enough

to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.

- They are not able to manage a platform

that has more than two billion people on it.

- «Narrator» In Myanmar, hate speech on Facebook

has led violent crimes against the Rohingya people.

650,000 of them have had to flee their homes

with their lives.

- You only have to look to countries like Myanmar,

where Facebook, for all intents and purposes,

is actually what people are using as the internet.

And it is an engine for spreading hate speech,

for planning harassment,

and for in some ways enabling genocide.

- The capacity to persuade people,

of blatant untruths,

that capacity seems to have gone up.

People have always tried to manipulate opinion, that's true,

but the capacity to do that,

in manufactured huge numbers,

through algorithms and things, is new.

Although propaganda's always sought to hide itself,

its capacity to do that in social media is enhanced.

A lot of confusion has been sown really,

by a lot of the ways in which intellectuals

have talked about truth.

There is no such thing as the truth.

That's what undergraduates write essays,

they start, undergraduate,

who've never tried to find out what the truth is,

say, in this Olympian way,

there are many truths.

There's been a philosophical and sociological

undermining of the fact that trying to establish reality,

is a very fierce discipline.

- «Narrator» Perhaps we should regard the lessons

of human history as a cautionary tale,

and try to veer away from the horrors of our past.

But is it actually possible to take the icons of history,

and infuse them with new meaning?

(engines roaring)

- «Narrator» We are a highly social species.

We have retained our tribal instincts,

and have a deep need for belonging,

that is firmly rooted in our evolution.

Since our earliest existence,

our inclination to imagine collective fictions

has allowed great civilizations to rise,

and for humanity to flourish.

But we must also constantly examine these narratives,

with disciplined reason, and skepticism.

We must strive to reclaim history where it has been erased,

to stand firm against authoritarianism,

to combat demagogues with an arsenal of humor and wit.

We must all be aware of our own emotions,

and how they can be maliciously,

and manipulatively exploited.

There are no easy answers,

there is only personal responsibility.

- In a democracy, it matters what people think.

Therefore, you're always gonna have wars of persuasion.

You're always gonna have battles

over the hearts and minds of the citizenry.

That's what it means to engage in

self-government as a society.

- Decisions have to be rationalized,

decisions have to be explained.

Propaganda could be good or bad.

It could be a warning on the cigarette packet,

or it could be, "Triumph of the Will."

Maybe we should just understand it more.

- I think everybody has to take real responsibility

to live a much more uncomfortable, awkward life,

testing themselves, because that it really matters.

- Anything that satisfies or reassures,

is gonna be very compelling,

and I think in a way,

it's as though the commodity here is hope.

And you can either poison people with false hopes,

or you can inspire them.

What's being sold though, is a better future.

(dramatic orchestral music)

Subtitles by Broadcast Intelligence Ltd