Comment by cassianoleal
2 months ago
> Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda
In Portuguese, I never found it difficult - mostly because, as the OP suggests, there is no material difference. If you want to talk about political propaganda, either say "propaganda" and let the other person deduct from context that you mean political propaganda, or explicitly say "political propaganda" (propaganda política).
In some ways, it might even be better as it will require you to actually characterise whether you mean political in the party-electoral sense, or in the ideological sense, etc.
The first time I heard the word "propaganda" in the English language, I assumed it was a less used synonymous for "advertisement". Despite having lived in an English-speaking country for over a decade, I still see them both as one and the same.
I sometimes feel like the separation is mostly used as a means to purport corporate and commercial advertising as legitimate, good and desirable (or at least acceptable) whilst keeping the idea of political and ideological advertisement as evil.
Both are bad. Both are means to manipulate an individual's opinion in favour of the advertiser. Commercially it is so I feel compelled to trade a portion of my life and health (in the form of money that I earned through work) to them in for a good or a service that I may otherwise not have thought worth the exchange.
Politically it's the same, only this time instead of my money they want my vote or my support for a certain policy that might even be against my personal or collective interests.
English speakers often do care about the connotation of "propaganda" as something deceptive or manipulative (with the paradigmatic example probably being wartime propaganda which tries to influence populations, supposedly without regard for the truth).
It's true that "propaganda" in the disparaging sense is more applied to political and ideological messages, but you can sometimes see it used about commercial messages when the speaker believes that those messages are especially manipulative, for example when the speaker believes an industry is bad but is wrongfully portraying itself as good by covering up harms that it causes. You might hear this more in connection with an "industry" ("tobacco industry propaganda" or "oil industry propaganda"), but I've occasionally heard it in connection with individual companies. But the negative connotation is pretty strong, so some listeners might be uncomfortable if they don't share the speaker's views of the propaganda author.
One can also say that a book is propaganda in the sense that the book is dishonest and manipulative advocacy, where the author isn't showing respect for the readers.
I wanted to write something about the question of how American rhetoric (and courts) see the relative value, or relative harmfulness, of commercial versus political advertising. But this turned into a complicated discussion that I'm not sure I can do a good job of, so I'm going to hold off on that for now.
> English speakers often do care about the connotation of "propaganda" as something deceptive or manipulative
I know they do. If you read again, you'll notice that my point was not that they don't care about the negative connotations of the word "propaganda". It was that having a separate one for "advertisement" serves as a way to accept the latter as benign.