(click, film rolling) (dynamic rhythmic music) ♪ (astronaut) Oh, it’s beautiful Mike, it really is.

(beep) (explosion) (marching feet) ♪ (spray hissing) ♪ Propaganda is political brainwashing.

♪ It’s a calculated attack on the complexity of other people’s minds.

♪ (actor) Behold his mighty hand!

It’s the invisible hand.

It’s getting you to submit without realizing consciously that you’re submitting.

(man 1) What if the media is the enemy of the people?

♪ (horse whinnies) (water crashing) ♪ Wherever there is power, there is propaganda.

If we grow up only surrounded by propaganda, then, how do we know what is truth?

♪ (George W. Bush) See, in my line of work, you 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.

350 million pounds.

♪ (speaking foreign language) (explosion) (man 2) Propaganda is not going to die out.

Propaganda is essential for the modern state.

(man 3) How can we protect democracy from people tampering with the truth?

The truth about Negroes and foreigners!

(clamor) ♪ (rhythmic music) ♪ In the wrong hands, uh, the power of art is a dangerous thing.

(dynamic rhythmic music) ♪ (indistinct remarks) (producer) John is doing this thing with you walking in.

You’ll just... (narrator) We allow ourselves to be manipulated by fictions... ...as though they were uncontestable truths, as if we cannot distinguish between the two.

(producer) Okay.

Can you, um, 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.

(soft music) But how is it possible that our powers of reason have so often been overtaken by the irrational?

If we look, uh, back at the history of humankind, language is a medium that provided, uh, 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.

♪ So, 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 of Neanderthals, that, 65,000 years ago, the Neanderthal stood there and made this symbol is just--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.

It’s the tools from which propaganda formed.

♪ So, to make this, they would have--someone-- an individual would have come along and placed their hand against the wall, and they’d have blown pigment, either by spitting it or blowing it through a tube.

And when the hand’s removed, you have a negative hand stencil.

And this is the same method that modern graffiti artists use to make their graffiti today.

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.

♪ (Adam Phillips) 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.

♪ So, it’s not surprising that our ancestors found these places full of awe.

Look at it, it’s like a modern cathedral.

It’s full of beautiful stalagmite formations.

And, of course, they’d have been walking around with small tallow lamps.

The shadows would have been awesome.

Uh, it would have been an eerie place, it would have been the place that the spirits lived.

♪ 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.

(rousing string music) Is that why we’re 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.

(cacophony of noises) They scream out to us from our own computers and cellphones, 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?

(Adolf Hitler speaking in German) ♪ (narrator) 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... (clamor, shouting) ...we need to stop and ask ourselves how we got here.

(shattering crash) (shouting) This film is a cautionary tale and a call to action at a precarious moment in our history.

(soft whooshing slows) (tense, percussive music) ♪ (Craig Silverman) 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.

(film slate snaps) (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 Hillary Clinton had approved a sale of weapons to ISIS.

They were everywhere.

(soft, tense music) ♪ (Paolo Granata) 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.

Uh, 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.

♪ (David Welch) The use of propaganda to depict a cult of personality, we can go right back to Alexander the Great.

Um, Alexander the Great was one of the-- one of the first leaders to recognize the importance of the way in which his presence should be symbolized.

(man 3) There’s a case to be made for him being one of the greatest propagandists ever.

He became a god.

That--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 going to be fine."

(chiming music) ♪ (man 4) 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.

(placid music) (narrator) Sometimes, the most insidious propaganda is the propaganda of omission.

(man 5) You look at these beautiful paintings and you see this kind of sublime light.

♪ But they also have this kind of ideology embedded in them.

♪ The artists of that time were selling this idea of the American West as a... a kind of an empty paradise, a kind of an empty, big piece of empty real estate.

My intent was to really make history paintings to tell a completely different narrative of North America.

♪ My name is Kent Monkman, and I’m a Cree visual artist.

And I returned to the zenith of propaganda painting in the 19th century.

For me, that was the most sophisticated form of painting, because it embraced all aspects of painting.

It embraced the brush stroke, the surface, the content, bringing it all together to serve a larger purpose.

I thought, "Can I bring this authority of history painting to Indigenous-- our own histories, um, my own histories, my own personal histories, and the histories of my own community?

Can I communicate, you know, the histories of indigenous people with this power?"

(dramatic music) ♪ So, this painting is called "The Scoop."

In the 1960s in Canada, um, children were taken out of their families and out of their communities and adopted out into nonindigenous families and residential schools.

(brush strokes canvas) The forcible transfer of children from one cultural group to another is a definition of genocide.

And the Mountie, of course, is this, uh, you know, friendly, innocuous symbol of Canada that’s used on postcards.

In fact, they were the perpetrators of this policy.

To this day, my family still reverberates from the trauma of-- of colonialism.

I want to dismantle the propaganda of, you know, the government selling people a myth, a story, a lie about themselves, about their own histories, and about Indigenous people.

(dark percussive music) ♪ Hate!

Hate!

Hate!

(all continue chanting "Hate!")

(dark music) ♪ (explosion) "1984," a dystopian novel of a totalitarian society in which personal relationships and the regime are terrifying.

Room 101.

Has never been out of print since he published it.

♪ And suddenly, it escalated up the world’s bestselling lists, again.

They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.

(announcer) Brothers!

We’re at war with the people of Eurasia.

The vile and ruthless aggressors who have committed countless atrocities and who are guilty of every bestial crime a human being can commit.

States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world.

(shouting) (Jean Seaton) Suddenly, people want to read Orwell.

As a warning system, it’s like a... it’s like a medical direc-- directory.

What’s wrong with us?

Are we taken in by Big Brother?

Could we be made to hate somebody on the flip of an ideological switch?

(dramatic music) (echoed clanking) (muffled shouting) I’d always read it as describing another world.

But it suddenly felt very painful to read it, because it felt it was describing... the world I was in.

What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.

Our press secretary gave alternative facts... No, it isn’t truth, truth isn’t truth... (crowd chanting) Hate!

Hate!

Hate!

(soft, tense music) (narrator) Reject the evidence, but have faith in magical mythologies.

(stately music) 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, uh, the sense of the original Latin term is, uh, "to plant."

The planting of, uh, ideas.

Uh, it’s used in the Catholic Church, uh, as a way of describing the process of evangelization.

You-you plant or you seed, uh, the faith.

♪ (Colin Moore) 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 the iniquitous sale of 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.

♪ (David Welch) But then we have, first of all, various popes trying to counter the propaganda of Protestantism.

(Colin Moore) 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.

♪ 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.

♪ My name is Jim Fitzpatrick, and, uh, I’m an Irish artist, and I’m probably best known as the creator of the famous or infamous 1968 red-and-black Che Guevara poster titled "Viva Che."

(lilting, upbeat music) ♪ I was working as a barman in a pub in Kilkee, and in walked Che Guevara.

And, of course, being a barman, you learn to talk to people, that 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, fogbound, 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, this is the real, you know, hero of the revolution."

♪ I did many, many versions of the "Che" before I came to the final version, and, uh, here’s a couple of ’em.

As you can see, they’re overcomplicated.

I needed to simplify, so I started simplifying.

These are not in sequence, but you can see what I’m up to.

This was one I was going to do as a poster and didn’t.

’Cause that’s what he looked like when I actually met him.

(somber music) ♪ 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.

Right?

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, as residents 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, or 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.

(slinky, sinister music) 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 kinda good, you know?

It’s nice at my age to be lookin’ back and thinkin’, "Well, I did something decent with my life.

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

♪ (intense, discordant music) ♪ ♪ (David Welch) 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.

(faint explosions, gunfire) 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.

(somber music) ♪ Propaganda is used by all the belligerents.

Uh, they use the old media, the print, posters, et cetera.

But they also use the new technologies, and, in particular, the cinema.

(dramatic classical 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, uh, Italy, Russia, and 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.

(somber classical music) ♪ (grand classical music) ♪ ♪ (cheering) If you look at films such as "The Fall of Berlin," here you see Stalin depicted in cinematic form.

(exuberant choral music) We have an actor who becomes a national treasure, who plays Stalin in a number of films.

(crowd cheers) (David Welch) 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.

Long live Stalin!

(grand musical fanfare) ♪ (somber music) ♪ (Adam Phillips) Propaganda is something that we cannot bring our full intelligence to bear on.

So, there’s something about propaganda that actually disables our intelligence.

And so, we might look back and think, "How could I have believed that?"

It’s a bit like at the end of a love affair where you think, "How could I possibly have 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.

♪ (thudding blows) ♪ (dramatic percussive music) ♪ (intense patriotic choral music) ♪ ♪ Since we have been talking about propaganda, I would definitely, definitely, without a doubt, say that a lot of the, um, narratives about North Korea that we get in our Western media are propaganda.

(soft, tense music) (narrator) Morten Traavik is an artist and entrepreneur who stages music events around the world.

His special fascination with North Korea has lead him to face the unique challenge of producing concerts in that hermit kingdom.

♪ (ponderous music) (Morten Traavik) Many people think that a place like North Korea, it must be like Mordor, it must be like, you know, hell on Earth.

And-and many people make a living out of selling this narrative.

But the fact is, and you can ask anybody who has grown up in a dictatorship or in a totalitarian system, people censor themselves, because we are comfortable animals, most of us.

We like to stay on the safe side and we want to keep out of trouble.

♪ Even in North Korea, people actually, many people, know what is propaganda and what is not propaganda.

And that’s a paradox that people are living an existence which is so obviously manipulated.

There is a level of total staging in the average North Korean’s life.

But that level is so obvious that you can have a parallel existence below that level of, basically, a normal life, as long as you pay lip service.

(crowd cheering) In any kind of totalitarian system, they say the same, that, "Yes, we did wave our flags, we went for the May 1st parade.

We did all that stuff, we keep our sanity."

(somber music) ♪ We in the, more or less, free world, we are so trained now.

We are not that susceptible, for instance, to North Korean propaganda.

For us, that is quaint and kitsch, even.

But we are also subject to many, many forms of propaganda, all the time, that are more subtle.

(orchestral music) ♪ Which might lead us to the misconception that we are, somehow, less exposed than the average North Korean.

And this, I don’t necessarily agree with.

♪ Propaganda is something other people consume.

I mean, I think that that’s sort of our default definition, right?

We don’t go around-- 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, um, other people do.

(electronic music) 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 sort of conventional narratives of what propaganda is, is how much is left out.

(male announcer) Adreline 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 sort of Bureau of Male Affairs pushing this 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 B.

-All these stereotypes are endlessly reinforced.

(suspenseful music) Lauren, will you accept this rose?

(Astra Taylor) 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.

-Yes.

(man #1) How does that make you feel?

(woman #1) 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."

(soft music) Capitalism creates tremendous envy.

Because a lot of people feel extremely deprived and resentful, because they are living in a culture in which it appears as though one percent 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.

(clinking) ♪ (panting) (moody music) ♪ (interviewer) What do you see your role to be?

(Sabo) I see myself as a political guerilla 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 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, wherever, Breitbart, within 24 hours.

♪ I like the Obama Drone series that I did.

It’s, basically, a celebrity that drones on and on and on about their politics, and I kind of figured Hollywood is like the drone base, where the celebrities, like, fly out into the country, and they, like, 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.

(laughing) (Sabo) He won a Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s like for God 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 bull... wallpaper.

And, so, it’s like, "You know what, you had an opportunity to show that you really spoke against power, like, 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, 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 the punk rock.

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

(grunts) Over there, over there, over there.

And the left, they control the school system... Carabiners out.

...they control Hollywood, they control the music industry.

Don’t pull too hard.

You name it, they control it, to which they’ll say, "Well, you 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 ...ed.

♪ It’s really bad when you reach a point in time when just telling the truth is revolutionary.

(lively music) ♪ There are a lot of dangers to putting work up in public without permission, I’ve been arrested 18 times.

(siren wailing) ♪ 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.

♪ (contemplative music) ♪ 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, you know, lightning in a bottle, perfect storm.

I created the "Hope" poster as just a grassroots initiative.

♪ But after I made, um, the image, which originally said "progress," they found that it caught on very quickly virally.

(Barack Obama) We need a new politics and we need a new president.

(dramatic music) (Shepard Fairey) 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, uh, I like the word "hope," because I think, during Bush, a lot of people felt hopeless, and without hope, people don’t act.

(applause) ♪ The Obama branding was excellent, his logo, the type choices they made.

But there hadn’t been anything with that human connection.

And, you know, I’d like to think that beyond just the human connection, that the 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 deracialize.

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 still is, um, you know, it’s American rather than African American.

(soft music) People are looking back very fondly at that poster and it’s because they don’t wanna lose hope.

♪ (dark music) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (children speaking Chinese) ♪ ♪ (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.

(soft guitar and piano music) ♪ (enigmatic music) ♪ (Edward Jones-Imhotep) In totalitarian regimes, what gets erased often is the idea about who created the art.

You know, 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.

(screaming) (dramatic music) ♪ (tense music) ♪ ♪ ♪ (woman #2) You have to wait here, please, we have to transfer him to the intensive care.

(man #2) Wait, the nurse’s is coming.

(machine beeping) (camera shutter clicking) (dramatic music) ♪ ♪ ♪ (intense music) ♪ (shouting in German) (Colin Moore) 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.

(Rebecca Goldstein) Art, it’s a powerful means of--of tapping into the emotion.

There is something very unifying about it and transcendent.

I mean, the feeling of transcendence is an emotion of coming out of your own little life and just feeling one with something larger.

It’s one of the most powerful emotions we can have and it can be very dangerous.

(shouting in German) ♪ (spirited orchestral music) ♪ (man #3) All of this was really operatic because it came out of Wagner in many senses.

(soft violin music) People would believe it because it used components of information in a manipulative way to sway people’s thought to a kind of almost religious belief in a system.

♪ Most Germans, in the years of Hitler’s rise, were still churchgoers.

♪ They were still able to associate this kind of nocturnal, torchlit procession with candlelit processions of an entirely different kind.

♪ The use of these elements, which involve all of the senses, the visual components, the buildings, the backdrops, smell for the incense, the body, the choreography of processions, the music... ♪ ...all of this is present in organized religion and in the quasi-religious organization of ideologies, like Nazism.

♪ And it’s enormously effective because it really involves the entire person.

♪ It relates the strong, sensual responses to what I believe to be ultimate truths.

♪ And, so, at that point, my senses, my life, and eternal truth become a single thing in these privileged moments.

It’s very beautiful, it’s very moving, it’s very dangerous if it’s misused.

♪ When I, as a Christian, when I, as a Christian priest, celebrate with the choir, singing with incense in a beautiful church surrounded by masterpieces in art, I know what I’m doing, I know what the impact of, uh, the images, the smells, the sounds, uh, the words that I’m pronouncing has on people who believe in all of this.

And I do it, not because I want to manipulate them, but because I think that this really brings us all closer to the mystery of a spiritual God, who becomes a physical human being, which is a sacred core of Christianity.

(majestic music) ♪ Uh, if we’re all wrong, uh, it has at least been innocent manipulation.

(chuckling) ♪ My name is Norman Lloyd.

And I have been in this business since 1932.

(piano music) So, I’ve been in it for quite some time.

♪ Well, I was a good friend of Charlie Chaplin.

I would go up there about three times a week and play tennis.

Well, that’s Charlie, all those shots are Charlie.

♪ And there he is, he’s serving.

He was--he was good.

It’s just that he wouldn’t wear his glasses.

So, in doubles, he couldn’t play the net.

But other than that, he was good, he was okay.

(interviewer) Okay, you’re being kind, though, ’cause you have adored him.

The truth is, you could beat him in tennis, couldn’t you?

Well, I could beat a lot of people.

(laughing) The Great Dictator, it’s one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen.

(laughing) I think it’s incredible how he does those two characters.

The Tramp, which is heaven-sent, the most beautiful creation, The Tramp, ever.

How do?

And Hitler!

(speaking German) And he does those two things and then ends up with this fantastic speech.

We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.

We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

He drops out of character, turns to the camera and speaks into the camera, to the people of the world.

You, the people, have the power!

The power to create machines, the power to create happiness!

You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful!

To make this life a wonderful adventure!

What a moment.

Let us fight for a new world, a decent world.

He was creating propaganda, because he felt very intensely about the necessity for it.

In the name of democracy, let us all unite!

(cheering) (dramatic music) ♪ ♪ (boinging) ♪ Trump, every picture of him is a revelation, you know, just 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, it’s too bad he is who he is.

♪ I got a lot of these, but this is 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.

You know, 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, you know, it seems like he’s in the process of melting.

Here’s a fat joke, is 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 Heiling, basically.

♪ I’m racked with self-doubt about what I’m doing half the time.

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

And, uh, cartoonists, you know, there’s nothing particularly pure about what we’re doing, I think.

I’m trying for a laugh, basically, and I’ll go to--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 was one of the architects of pointing out Trump’s small hands.

And, I mean, that seems like propaganda to me, in a way.

That’s part of the propaganda of satire.

Because Trump, I mean, 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 bumbling fool.

But satirists fix on one tiny thing, and if enough of them are doing that, that becomes the way someone is viewed.

And, you know, that’s taking an untruth, you know, and making it into a, you know, an iconic image.

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

♪ I’m trying to get a laugh, I’d like to do something funny.

I mean, going for pure outrage is another thing and it’s got its place, but it’s dangerous.

(gunshots) (speaking foreign language) (gunshots continue) (gunshots) (dark, somber music) ♪ (speaking foreign language) (gunshot) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (plane’s engine puttering) (narrator) Paranoia, xenophobia, irrational fear... these are the pillars of propaganda that have led us into our deadliest conflicts.

The Cold War was a new type of war, fueled by unrelenting propaganda on all sides.

It was a war based on the constant threat of instant global annihilation.

(explosion) (Edward Jones-Imhotep) The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, without any warning, it’s actually one of the most potent forms of propaganda at the time, and it’s explicitly acknowledged to be that.

(announcer) A bomb of unprecedented destructiveness had exploded.

Three days later, a second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

(dramatic music) Strangely, and very chillingly, the United States Military actually reserved a number of cities in Japan, didn’t bomb them using conventional bombs during the war itself, precisely so that if they developed an atomic bomb, they could judge its full destructive capacity.

(announcer) Looking toward zero point from the roof of the Red Cross hospital a mile away, the tremendous destruction created by the first atomic bomb can be seen.

This boundary, three-tenths of a mile away from zero point, shows considerable damage in spite of fairly good construction.

Always in the back of the mind of the people who were making these considerations were, let’s call them, the propagandistic effects.

It’s a message, not only to Japan but more importantly to the Soviet Union.

♪ (Edward Jones-Imhotep) The Cold War is the mobilization of culture and of ideology, and the stakes of it are global.

Every citizen of the world is potentially a target.

News reporting, for instance, becomes, in some sense, a form of propaganda too, in that it reports the kind of virtues of the United States or the victories, for instance, of things like the Space Race.

And these become their own form of propaganda as well.

(majestic music) (Neil Armstrong) That’s one small step for man... ♪ ...one giant leap for mankind.

(soft, suspenseful music) ♪ ♪ A photograph, by definition, is a lie.

It’s a frozen moment in time.

Come stand 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.

Perfect.

♪ -(camera shutter clicks) -Nice, stay there.

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, um, a lot of people call me provocateur, I guess.

♪ (camera shutter clicks) Perfect.

Making something iconic is always a goal.

Obviously, it’s easier said than done, but, you know, when you sent out to do something, sometimes you have no idea.

(soft, quirky music) ♪ I think a lot of people thought that, you know, it was like we’d planned it out for months and done a whole thing.

She wanted to do something, you know, with Trump involved.

And her hairstylist 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."

They just--you know, it was a fake, like, Halloween style-- It just-- it was just a fake mask.

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

And I said, "Look, we cover it in blood, it’ll hide it."

I put some blood on it, and then, I was like, "Oh, yeah, this works, (head thuds) (music intensifies) ♪ It went live on my site.

I was asleep.

Uh, I wake up... ♪ ...and it’s on TMZ, and it’s, you know, everywhere.

(soft, suspenseful music) ♪ Everything exploded, and there were people outside my house, and, you know, there were 20 news vans, and there were, like, random guys just kind of walking around my house.

We didn’t know what was happening.

You know, I had the FBI and the Secret Service, you know, I had all these people.

♪ And then, Kathy started to get this, you know, ISIS thing.

And she had called me and was like, "People are really mad at me.

Uh, 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 your career’s over," that’s scary to anybody.

I made a mistake and I was wrong.

And then the president tweets about it.

♪ This dude tweeted about it, and when he tweeted about it, that took it to a level of international that I’ve never seen before.

♪ And that was all orchestrated.

♪ Apparently, there was a whole thing between Fox News and Trump to push all of the attention to the Kathy thing, and take all the attention away from Paris Accord, take all the attention away from all these other things.

You know, 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 doing.

It’s the greatest magic trick ever, you know?

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.

I mean, 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.

(tense music) (speaking in foreign language) ♪ (Christiane Gruber) ISIS popped up on the scene in 2014.

They make claims to orthodoxy, to having the truth of Islam, and yet their techniques for creating visualized art forms, the art of terror, are very much in line with modern practices.

♪ They’ve created videos of themselves destroying artworks in the Mosul art museum.

They’ve made videos of themselves destroying the famous winged bull lions at Nineveh and Nimrud.

(explosion) ♪ And, of course, they’re very well-known for their videos of decapitations and other murders of non-combatants.

♪ In all of those videos, what you see is that they’re drawing upon... -(fighter jets whizzing) -(explosion) ...the digital media.

The videos are short, usually three to five minutes, and they’re made for consumption online.

(mysterious music) ♪ It’s incredibly well thought out, and, oftentimes, they make use of slow-motion in a really dramatic moment that recalls Hollywood movies but also the aesthetic of gaming, video games.

(grunting) ♪ And part of their strategy is to rely on us, the viewers, whether we agree with them or disagree with them, to propagate those videos.

In 2015, the United States government understood that they needed to wage war, not on the ground, not boots on the ground, but online.

And they started really going after the digital infrastructure of ISIS, taking down Twitter accounts and so forth.

(somber music) So, they were bombing the internet, so to speak.

♪ We don’t speak about ISIS quite as much now.

Instead, what we’ve seen is that alt-right and neo-Nazi groups have taken the lead.

And they have a much greater presence online now than ISIS.

(man’s voice) Two, one.

(explosion) These are the stakes.

We either stand up to supporters of terrorism, or we and our allies risk losing the freedom we cherish.

(Christiane Gruber) Now, in the post-9/11 world, Muslim communities are frequently the target of anti-Muslim propaganda.

(tense music) You know, it seems these days that not a single one of us boards an airplane, attends a concert or a sporting event, and doesn’t have at least a fleeting concern that terror can strike.

(Christiane Gruber) These paid groups include ACT for America, Secure America Now.

This is not haphazard.

There’s a strategy behind it, and there’s a lot of money as well.

Researchers have shown just how well-funded anti-Muslim hate groups are.

It’s easy to lose sight of an issue that defines our generation, the need to stop terrorism in our time.

And this is an incredibly polarizing and polarized view of the world.

And, in the end, extreme groups benefit from that polarized view.

And they need each other.

They need an enemy.

(indistinct chanting) We’re so primed, our species, for xenophobia.

We’re so primed to blame someone else.

And we’re so primed for resentment.

There are always going to be people who have more, who are better looking, and smarter, and richer, and more powerful, and all of those things.

A situation that’s ripe for somebody to stir up resentments.

And we’re seeing that, you know, we’re seeing that all over.

(grim music) ♪ (indistinct chanting) ♪ (protestor) Jihad is here, and he’s here!

(protestor 2) About goddamn time!

(Steve Bannon) Let them call you racist.

Let them call you xenophobes.

Wear it as a badge of honor.

Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.

♪ (narrator) Steve Bannon, the man who wants to destroy the American establishment, and to make right wing extremism the mainstream, now has Europe in his crosshairs.

(presenter speaking Italian) (applause) Steve Bannon is mainly known as the former campaign advisor of Donald Trump.

Of course, as the editor of Breitbart News... ♪ Steve Bannon is a very important contemporary example of a propaganda artist that operates within a democracy.

He unleashed a movement that got his candidate of choice elected to The White House.

The fake media tried to stop us from going to The White House.

But I’m president and they’re not.

(cheering) ♪ God, who else can compete with him for influence?

♪ (Edward Jones-Imhotep) This spreading of his message to Europe shows the kind of transportability of a set of skills around propaganda.

♪ There are a lot of places in the world where these kinds of tensions or issues can end up being exploited for these purposes, and where it can be done, basically, underground.

(suspenseful music) ♪ Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company.

And as 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.

♪ (Craig Silverman) 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.

(soft, grim music) 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 to violent crimes against the Rohingya people.

♪ 650,000 of them have had to flee their homes for their lives.

♪ ♪ (Craig Silverman) 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... (soft music) ...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 on 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--undergraduates 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.

(machinery whirring) (energetic music) ♪ The role of journalism in a democracy is the critical last line of defense when it comes to reality.

♪ More and more people have got opinions.

Everyone has an opinion, not everyone has a fact.

Facts, absolutely, are not negotiable.

There are facts.

There is proof, and journalists deal in fact, we deal in the real world.

♪ One of the interesting challenges we have in our industry is getting people to believe that we are telling the truth.

♪ So, if you take, for example, anonymous sources, when you use an anonymous source, a journalist is withdrawing from the credibility bank.

And you’re saying to the reader, "Trust me on this, there’s a bunch of good reasons why we’re granting anonymity," but there is a recognition that that is a line that you’re asking the reader to trust you on.

♪ We are fact-based, and one of the things that we insist upon is fact-check.

And there are stories that take many months, sometimes years, for us to put together.

So, there’s one story I’m sitting on, I’ve been sitting on it for five years.

I can’t get the second source.

I know it’s true.

It’s very interesting, I know it to be true, ’cause of who told me and I trust that person, but I haven’t got the second source.

But when we do it, will we explain that it took us five years or we will just simply allow it to go out and say that’s what we did.

It’s just another story.

And I think what’s important now is that we provide an increased value judgment around our work, and we say, "You can go to a lot of different places to get a lot of daily or hourly news, but this is one place where you’re getting the information because of the commitment, and the effort, and the expense, that only professional journalism can offer.

(soft, tense music) ♪ (narrator) If basic concepts like truth are being attacked by reckless propaganda, then what weapons can be used to combat it?

Perhaps, one of the most effective will be an occasional dose of subversion.

(bright music) (indistinct singing) ♪ (applause) ♪ (Morten Traavik) We are just getting out the last two hard disks that we need for the performance.

Laibach is a Slovenian art rock band, I guess you could say, in simple terms, who were founded in 1980 in then Yugoslavia.

Everybody just stay together.

For me, as the director of that whole event, it was an irresistible challenge to try to bring a band that has been accused of fascism... Life.

(Morten Traavik) ...to perform in one of the world’s most tightly controlled states.

Life.

(majestic music) (Morten Traavik) Laibach is, in many ways, the missing link between totalitarianism and rock music.

♪ They re-appropriate fascist, Nazi, communist, all the kind of totalitarian ideologies, they put to their own use.

♪ When we all feel the power ♪ ♪ Life is life ♪ ♪ When we all feel the pain ♪ ♪ Life is life ♪ (Morten Traavik) They critique by exaggerating the language of power, but just a little bit.

Life!

♪ (Morten Traavik) Right down to wearing seemingly fascist-inspired uniforms on stage.

(Morten Traavik) I told the committee that, look, Laibach has, in the past, been accused of fascism and of being an evil band.

North Korea is regularly accused of being a fascist-like state in the Western media.

So, you know what the Western media is like.

They make up things all the time.

So, you and Laibach have this in common.

You are both misunderstood.

♪ Let’s have a couple of just Milan.

(camera shutter clicks) I’ve certainly been accused of being a useful idiot for the North Korean regime, from many quarters.

(assistant) Yeah, let’s get Milan in the middle and... (Morten Traavik) It will be very respectful, I promise.

I find it much more challenging to work as a termite, uh, more than an elephant.

The termite burrows inside big, seemingly insurmountable structure and hollows it out from the inside instead of smashing the whole porcelain shop.

(soft, tense music) You can burrow into the system, and you can use the power and the language of power to your own ends.

(bright rock music) ♪ So, when they performed in front of an unsuspecting North Korean crowd of 1,500 people... ♪ ...that creates a magic of contradiction and paradox.

♪ ♪ We rise, we grow ♪ ♪ ♪ We walk and we stand tall ♪ ♪ ♪ We never fall ♪ ♪ As big as the sky ♪ (Morten Traavik) I think most of them really hated it, but then again that’s a total normal reaction to a band like Laibach anywhere in the world.

♪ From north and south ♪ ♪ ♪ We come from east and west ♪ ♪ ♪ Breathing as one ♪ (Morten Traavik) But I did hear from some university students, and they said a very beautiful thing that, "Oh, we really loved it, it was something new".

♪ ♪ We stand alone ♪ (Morten Traavik) They didn’t really, you know, evaluate the music, whether it was good or bad, but it was something new.

And to them, that was more than enough, and to me.

♪ (applause) (tank approaching) (somber music) ♪ (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.

♪ (mellow rock music) But is it actually possible to take the icons of history and infuse them with new meaning?

♪ (engines humming) ♪ Heil!

(energetic music) ♪ (engines humming) ♪ (explosion) ♪ (cheering) ♪ (soft, bright music) (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.

(soft, suspenseful music) 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.

♪ (Astra Taylor) 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 a cigarette packet, or it could be Triumph of the Will.

♪ Maybe if 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.

(grim, energetic music) ♪ (Adam Phillips) 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.

♪ (soft, suspenseful music) ♪ ♪