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Curriculum, programming, and propaganda

179 events 35 sources c. 301 BCE to 2023 updated 23 Jul 2026, 01:01

How schooling and media program minds: the deliberate use of curricula, textbooks, re-education, and mass persuasion to shape what people believe. The overlap of the education pillar and the media pillar.

How schooling and media program minds: the deliberate use of curricula, textbooks, re-education, and mass persuasion to shape what people believe. The overlap of the education pillar and the media pillar.

Figures Adolf HitlerAlfred MilnerAlice BaileyAugustusBruce BermanCarroll QuigleyCecil RhodesConfuciusDedan KimathiDwight D. EisenhowerEdward BernaysEdward L. Bernays

Linked to

this part of Media, propaganda, and influence this continues The history of education this part of Media, education, and information

Linked from

parallel this Education in Kenya parallel this Cultural Marxism: critical theory and the conspiracy theory parallel this Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination parallel this How the West supported the Nazis: finance, appeasement, and Cold War bargains parallel this Media, education, and information

179 newly added in the last 14 days

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    Euclid's Elements and the axiomatic method

    also in The history of mathematics

    Euclid gathered the geometry and number theory of his age into thirteen books built from a handful of definitions, postulates, and step-by-step proofs. The Elements set the model for how mathematics is done, starting from stated assumptions and deducing everything else, and it served as a textbook for over two thousand years. Little is known of Euclid himself, and much of the content he organized rather than discovered.

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    Augustus Establishes the Praetorian Guard

    also in The military as an idea: violence, the state, and society

    Emperor Augustus formalized the Praetorian Guard, an elite force stationed in and around Rome to protect the emperor. Over the following two centuries the Guard repeatedly made and unmade emperors, becoming the textbook case of praetorianism, where the very troops meant to guard the state's ruler instead control who rules. The term "praetorian" entered later political vocabulary to describe any military force that dominates civilian government.

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    Yellow Turban rebellion in China

    Taoism became a favored ideology for Chinese peasant rebels. The first major such revolt was the Yellow Turbans of 184 AD.

    • the favorite philosophy for peasant rebels for many centuries to come, starting with the Yellow Turbans of 184 AD.
      Debt: The First 5,000 Years
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    Religion and ideology

    also in The pillars of modern power

    Organized belief as a structure of authority. Faith, doctrine, moral systems, and ideological programs command loyalty, legitimize rulers, and help define the boundaries of acceptable thought and conduct.

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    Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine

    also in Science and technology, The history of science

    Ibn Sina (Avicenna) organized Greek and Islamic medicine into a single encyclopedic work that became a standard text in Europe and the Islamic world for centuries. It combined real clinical insight with the inherited humoral theory that was later abandoned. Its long reign shows both the strength and the danger of a single authoritative textbook.

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    Pacioli codifies double-entry in print

    also in Production and labor, The history of accounting

    The friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli published Summa de arithmetica, a math textbook that included a section describing the Venetian method of double-entry bookkeeping in clear steps. Printed on the new press, it spread the technique across Europe and earned Pacioli the title father of accounting. Historians stress he did not invent double-entry but was the first to write it down systematically for a wide audience.

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    Las Casas publishes his account of the destruction of the Indies

    also in Missions and lodges: two networks of empire

    The Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas, a former encomienda holder turned reformer, published "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies." It catalogued the killing and enslavement of native people by Spanish colonists and argued for their rights. He is a documented case of a missionary who became a leading critic of colonial violence, though his writings were later used as anti-Spanish propaganda by rival powers.

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    The divine right of kings

    also in The pillars of modern power

    The doctrine that monarchs rule by the will of God, answerable to no earthly power, binds throne and altar together. Sacred legitimacy, the claim that a social order is willed by heaven, is the deepest form of the religion and ideology pillar's power.

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    Authorized King James Bible appears

    Gatto notes that the Authorized King James Version of the Bible appeared in 1611 and became a universal textbook that spread reading and independent thought among ordinary people.

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    Pope Gregory XV founds the Propaganda Fide

    Pope Gregory XV creates the Congregatio de propaganda fide to supervise the Church's missionary efforts in the New World and elsewhere, establishing the institutional origin of the term 'propaganda'.

    • The word had been coined in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV, frightened by the global spread of Protestantism, urgently proposed an addition to the Roman curia.
      Propaganda
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    The Irish Rebellion of 1641

    also in Ireland: from the island of saints to the Republic

    Catholic gentry in Ulster rose against the Protestant settlers and the loss of their lands, and the revolt spread across Ireland. Settler communities were attacked and many killed, while accounts of the death toll were exaggerated in Protestant propaganda of the time. The rising fed English fears and helped set the scene for Cromwell's later reconquest.

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    The rise and judicial murder of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer

    also in Jews, moneylending, and the story of banking

    Joseph Suss Oppenheimer managed the finances of the Duke of Wurttemberg, raising money through taxes and monopolies that made him widely hated. When the duke died suddenly in 1737, Oppenheimer was arrested, tried on trumped-up charges, and hanged in 1738. His fate showed how quickly a court Jew's power evaporated, and the Nazis later made a vile propaganda film about him to stir up hatred, a reminder of how this real history was weaponized.

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    Timothy Dwight leads Yale

    Gatto describes Timothy Dwight, president of Yale after 1795 and an advocate of science-centered curriculum, as a foe of advancing democracy.

    • Timothy Dwight, longtime president of Yale after 1795, and a pioneer in modern education (advocating science as the center of curriculum), fought a mighty battle against advancing democracy.
      The Underground History of American Education , p. 31-32
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    Nathan Rothschild and the Waterloo bond myth

    also in Jews, moneylending, and the story of banking

    Nathan Mayer Rothschild made his London house a major force in British government finance around the Napoleonic Wars. A popular legend claims he got early news of Waterloo and made a killing crashing the market, a story pushed hardest in antisemitic propaganda and not supported by the evidence. The real achievement was ordinary hard finance, raising loans and trading bonds, not a secret coup.

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    The famine as genocide debate contested

    also in Ireland: from the island of saints to the Republic

    Some writers and activists, including nineteenth-century nationalist John Mitchel, argued that British policy amounted to a deliberate genocide, a view still held by some today. Most academic historians reject the genocide label, describing instead a mix of ideology, neglect and disastrous mismanagement rather than intent to exterminate. The framing remains politically charged and contested.

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    Canada's Indian Act and the reserve system

    also in Why Kenya was unique: the settler colony that could not hold

    The Indian Act of 1876 placed First Nations under federal control, confined them to reserves through the numbered treaties, and set up the residential school system that took Indigenous children from their families for generations. Settlers from Britain and Europe filled the land and became the lasting majority across most of the country. As in the United States, the settler population was never displaced, so no handover of power to the original inhabitants took place.

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    Rhodes writes his Confession of Faith

    also in Cecil Rhodes and the dream of empire

    The 23-year-old Cecil Rhodes sets down a Confession of Faith calling for a secret society to extend British rule over the whole world and bring the United States back into the empire. It is the documented ideological seed of the Rhodes Trust and, in Carroll Quigley's contested thesis, of a lasting Anglo-American elite network.

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    Canada's Indian residential schools

    also in The Catholic Church as a world power

    For more than a century the Canadian government funded a system of residential schools, most of them run by the Catholic Church, that removed roughly 150,000 Indigenous children from their families to strip them of their languages and cultures. Many suffered abuse and neglect, and thousands died. A 2015 truth commission called the system a cultural genocide.

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    Rudyard Kipling publishes 'The White Man's Burden'

    also in Colonization: the making of the modern world

    British writer Rudyard Kipling published the poem 'The White Man's Burden,' urging the United States to take up colonial rule in the Philippines as a supposed moral duty to civilize non-European peoples. The poem became a widely quoted expression of the ideology used to justify colonial rule as a benevolent civilizing mission. It has since become a byword for the racial paternalism underlying imperial expansion.

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    First Pan-African Conference meets in London

    Racializing ideologies were also challenged on the empires' global scale when, for instance, the first pan-African Conference met in London in 1900, b...

    • Racializing ideologies were also challenged on the empires' global scale when, for instance, the first pan-African Conference met in London in 1900, bringing together activists from Africa, Europe, the United States, 3 26 Chapter ro and the West Indies to discuss the common experience of discrimination and oppression and to begin a struggle against them.
      Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference , p. 343-348
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    Edward A. Ross publishes Social Control

    Gatto points to sociologist Edward A. Ross's 1901 book Social Control, which he says announced the plan to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media.

    • The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control.
      The Underground History of American Education , p. 60-61
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    Death of Rhodes and Milner's inheritance

    The book, following Quigley, says that when Rhodes died in 1902 Alfred Milner gained control of his money and used it to run the Network's propaganda machine. It presents Milner as Rhodes's chosen heir.

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    Colonial game reserves clear people from the land

    also in Ecology and environment, Fortress conservation: parks, conservancies, and the landless

    The protectorate set aside large game reserves such as the Southern Reserve, following the Yellowstone idea that true wilderness holds no people. Africans who had lived, grazed and hunted in these areas were pushed to the edges or moved out. The model treated human presence as a threat to nature rather than part of it, an ideology later called fortress conservation.

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    American Breeders Association turns to eugenic lobbying

    At the December 1909 American Breeders Association meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, Charles Davenport convinced the ABA to escalate from pure research into specific ethnic investigation, propaganda, and lobbying for eugenic legislation.

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    Sam Zemurray buys a coup in Honduras

    also in Banana republics: corporations and the coup

    The banana trader Sam Zemurray, head of the rival Cuyamel Fruit Company, bankrolls an armed overthrow of the Honduran government to protect his concessions and tax breaks. He hired the mercenary Lee Christmas and helped install the exiled Manuel Bonilla as president. It became a textbook case of a company toppling a government for private gain.

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    Bernays' sponsoring committee for Damaged Goods

    Bernays invented the authoritative sponsoring committee as a publicity device. He first used it in 1913, gathering a committee of physicians to endorse the Broadway play Damaged Goods, which dealt openly with venereal disease.

    • He first used this now-venerable gimmick in early 1913, assembling a “committee” of physicians to approve the Broadway production of Eugene Brieux’s play Damaged Goods, which dealt forthrightly with the issue of venereal disease.
      Propaganda
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    Bryce Committee atrocity report (1915)

    Quigley describes Allied atrocity propaganda, noting Lord Bryce headed a committee that produced a volume of such stories in 1915 and was evidently taken in by his own tales.

    • Lord Bryce headed a committee which produced a volume of such stories in 1915
      Tragedy and Hope , p. 230-232
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    Governments systematically deploy modern media in World War One

    Beginning in 1915, governments use the full range of modern media to mobilize populations for World War One, marking the first systematic propaganda campaign of the modern era.

    • it was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their populations to fanatical assent.
      Propaganda
    • it was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their populations to fanatical assent.
      Propaganda
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    Charteris fabricates German corpse-glycerine story (1917)

    Quigley cites as an example of manufactured propaganda that General Charteris in 1917 invented a story that the Germans were cooking human bodies for glycerine, complete with faked pictures.

    • General Henry Charteris in 1917 created a story that the Germans were cooking human bodies to extract glycerine, and produced pictures to prove it.
      Tragedy and Hope , p. 230-232
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    Creel's wartime propaganda bureau refuses the name

    The United States ran its First World War propaganda through the Committee on Public Information under George Creel. In his 1920 memoir Creel explained that they avoided the word propaganda because German use had tainted it, preferring to call their work education and information.

    • We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption
      Propaganda
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    German money reaches the Bolsheviks through intermediaries

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler

    German Foreign Ministry records, later published by historians, show funds channeled toward Bolshevik agitation through middlemen such as Alexander Parvus and the Stockholm banker Olof Aschberg. The amounts and their exact effect are debated, but the flow of German state money is documented. It was wartime subversion aimed at Russia's collapse, not ideological sympathy.

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    Masaryk times Czechoslovakia's independence for the press

    Bernays recounts advising on the timing of Czechoslovakia's declaration of independence. He says Thomas Masaryk moved the announcement to a Monday so newspapers worldwide would have more space to cover it.

    • Czechoslovakia officially became a free state on Monday, October 28, 1918, instead of Sunday, October 17, 1918, because Professor Masaryk realized that the people of the world would receive more information and would be more receptive to the announcement of the republic’s freedom on a Monday morning than on a Sunday
      Propaganda
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    The utilities' peacetime propaganda drive against public ownership

    The National Electric Light Association ran a long campaign to keep the power supply in private hands. Editor Mark Crispin Miller records it as the largest peacetime propaganda drive in U.S. history, aimed at discouraging public ownership of utilities.

    • From 1919 until 1934, NELA carried out the largest peacetime propaganda drive in U.S. history, intended to discourage public ownership of the utilities.
      Propaganda
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    George Creel publishes How We Advertised America

    George Creel, director of the U.S. Office of War Information, publishes How We Advertised America, defending wartime propaganda by claiming the U.S. never used propaganda but only presented facts.

    • We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption
      Propaganda
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    Bernays builds on Lippmann's Public Opinion

    Bernays drew his theory of an expert elite managing the public mind from Walter Lippmann, whose book Public Opinion appeared in 1922. Lippmann had concluded that ordinary people could not reliably think through public affairs and needed detached professionals to frame the issues.

    • Bernays derived this vision from the writings of his intellectual hero, Walter Lippmann, whose classic Public Opinion had appeared in 1922.
      Propaganda
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    Bernays orchestrates bacon breakfast campaign for Beechnut Packing Company

    Bernays creates a propaganda campaign using physician endorsements to promote eating bacon as a wholesome breakfast, establishing fake doctor testimonials as propaganda technique.

    • The new salesman will then suggest to physicians to say publicly that it is wholesome to eat bacon.
      Propaganda
    • The new salesman will then suggest to physicians to say publicly that it is wholesome to eat bacon. He knows as a mathematical certainty, that large numbers of persons will follow the advice of their doctors, because he understands the psychological relation of dependence of men upon their physicians.
      Propaganda
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    Italy adopts the Charter of Labour

    also in Fascism: rise and fall, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    The Fascist Grand Council proclaims the Charter of Labour, setting out the doctrine of the corporate state in which state-run corporations were meant to organize employers and workers together. In practice the system subordinated labor to the regime and gave employers the upper hand, and critics saw the corporatist promise as largely propaganda.

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    Arthur Ponsonby publishes Falsehood in Wartime

    British MP Arthur Ponsonby publishes Falsehood in WarTime, a direct refutation of Allied propaganda lies during World War One, exposing government deception.

    • That same year saw the publication of another, very different book on propaganda: Falsehood in WarTime, by the British MP Arthur Ponsonby
      Propaganda
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    Bernays and the engineering of consent

    also in The pillars of modern power

    Edward Bernays, in Propaganda, argues that the conscious manipulation of the public mind is a normal and necessary part of democratic society, and builds the public-relations industry to do it. Shaping desire and belief at scale is the media, education, and information pillar's deepest form of power.

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    Bernays applies Freudian psychology to selling

    Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, argues that people act on hidden motives they will not admit to themselves. He tells the propagandist to work from these true motives rather than the reasons people give, treating a purchase as a symbol of some suppressed desire.

    • It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which has been obliged to suppress.
      Propaganda
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    Bernays defines the invisible government contested

    In the opening of Propaganda, Bernays argues that the deliberate manipulation of mass opinion is a normal and necessary part of democratic society. He claims that those who do this work form an unseen ruling power he calls the invisible government.

    • The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
      Propaganda
    • Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
      Propaganda
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    Bernays names the public relations counsel

    Bernays describes how the growing complexity of society concentrated propaganda work in a new kind of specialist. He gives that specialist the title of public relations counsel, the self-description he used for his own trade.

    • The propagandist who specializes in interpreting enterprises and ideas to the public, and in interpreting the public to promulgators of new enterprises and ideas, has come to be know by the name of
      Propaganda
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    Bernays publishes Crystallizing Public Opinion

    Gatto notes that in 1928 Edward L. Bernays told readers of his book Crystallizing Public Opinion that invisible power controlled American life and that democracy was a front for wire-pulling.

    • In 1928, Edward L. Bernays, godfather of the new craft of spin control we call "public relations," told the readers of his book Crystallizing Public Opinion that "invisible power" was now in control of every aspect of American life.
      The Underground History of American Education , p. 52-53
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    Bernays' definition of modern propaganda

    Bernays offers his own working definition of the new propaganda. He frames it not as a single message but as an ongoing effort to shape events and thereby the public's relationship to an idea, group, or enterprise.

    • Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.
      Propaganda
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    Selling pianos through the music room

    Bernays gives the piano as his model of indirect selling. Instead of promoting pianos, the propagandist makes the music room fashionable, so that owning one leads people to want a piano as if it were their own idea.

    • The music room will be accepted because it has been made the thing. And the man or woman who has a music room, or has arranged a corner of the parlor as a musical corner, will naturally think of buying a piano. It will come to him as his own idea.
      Propaganda
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    The NAACP dramatizes its anti-lynching campaign

    Bernays offers a social-service example in which the NAACP fought lynching and discrimination in the South. As a matter of technique it staged an annual convention, held in Atlanta, to concentrate national attention on the problem.

    • The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had the fight in hand. As a matter of technique they decided to dramatize the year’s campaign in an annual convention which would concentrate attention on the problem.
      Propaganda
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    Light's Golden Jubilee stages a tribute to Edison

    In 1929 Bernays organized Light's Golden Jubilee, a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Edison's light bulb featuring Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Editor Mark Crispin Miller notes the event was in fact propaganda for General Electric and its National Electric Light Association.

    • This grand occasion, featuring a muchhyped joint appearance of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, was ostensibly an earnest and spontaneous celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s invention of the light bulb.
      Propaganda
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    Propaganda Ministry commissions the People's Radio

    In May 1933 the Propaganda Ministry took the initiative by coming to an agreement with a group of radio manufacturers to push through the large-scale production of a new standard radio.*’ This was to be cheaper than any radio previously on the market

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    The Nazis weaponize the Jewish finance lie legendary

    also in How the West supported the Nazis: finance, appeasement, and Cold War bargains, Jews, moneylending, and the story of banking, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    Nazi propaganda made the myth of Jewish financial and world control a core message, casting Jews as the hidden power behind both banking and communism to justify persecution. This lie helped pave the road to the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered. The trope of international Jewish finance is not a harmless exaggeration; it was central to the deadliest genocide of the modern era and is false in every part.

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    Nazi Reich Ministry of Propaganda under Goebbels

    also in Media, education, and information, Media, propaganda, and influence, Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination

    The Nazi government created the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels on 13 March 1933, giving the state control over press, radio, film, and the arts. It became a model of total propaganda by a modern dictatorship.

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    British Council founded

    also in Scholarships and the machinery of empire

    The British government founded the British Council to promote British culture, the English language, and educational exchange abroad. It was created partly in response to Fascist Italy's and Nazi Germany's own cultural propaganda efforts in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The Council went on to run scholarship and exchange programs that remain a central tool of British soft power.

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    Curtis publishes Civitas Dei

    Lionel Curtis's three-volume work argued that all history leads to a federation of the English-speaking peoples. Quigley treats it as central Milner Group propaganda for an Oceanic bloc.

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    Bernays sells Lucky Strikes for American Tobacco

    From the mid-1930s Bernays did extensive work for George Washington Hill's American Tobacco Company, helping sell Lucky Strike cigarettes. He later reversed course, gave up tobacco clients, and lobbied against the habit once its dangers were undeniable.

    • Bernays’s eventual stand on cigarettes was admirable indeed, especially considering his own prodigious work, from the mid-Thirties, for George Washington Hill’s American Tobacco Company.
      Propaganda
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    Howard C. Hill publishes The Life and Work of the Citizen

    In 1935 Howard C. Hill, head of the social science department at the University of Chicago's experimental school, published a civics textbook titled The Life and Work of the Citizen.

    • In 1935, at the University of Chicago’s experimental school where John Dewey had once held sway, Howard C. Hill, head of the social science department, published an inspirational textbook called The Life and Work of the Citizen.
      The Underground History of American Education , p. 1-8
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    Ludendorff Publishes Der Totale Krieg

    also in The military as an idea: violence, the state, and society

    Former World War I commander Erich Ludendorff published Der Totale Krieg (The Total War), arguing that modern war required mobilizing an entire nation's economy, population, and politics under military direction, with civilian leadership subordinated to the demands of war. The book argued explicitly against the idea of civilian control over military strategy, inverting the standard civil-military relationship. It became an influential statement of militarist ideology in the interwar period.

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    University of Chicago textbook decorated with fascist symbols

    Gatto reports that in 1935 Howard C. Hill, head of social science at the University of Chicago's experimental high school, published a textbook, The Life and Work of the Citizen, decorated throughout with fasces.

    • At the University of Chicago’s experimental high school, the head of the Social Science department, Howard C. Hill, published an inspirational textbook, The Life and Work of the Citizen.
      The Underground History of American Education , p. 124-125
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    Nuremberg Laws enacted

    also in Fascism: rise and fall

    The Reichstag, convened at the Nuremberg party rally, strips Jews of German citizenship and bans marriage between Jews and other Germans. Nazi racial ideology becomes the law of the state.

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    The Nazis appropriate Norse runes and symbols

    also in Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination, The Norse and Germanic gods

    Nazi Germany adopts Norse and Germanic runes, such as the SS sig-runes and the sun-wheel, as symbols of a mythic Aryan past, and the Ahnenerbe institute mined the myths for propaganda. The theft still shadows Norse symbols, which modern white-nationalist groups continue to misuse. The symbols are ancient; this political use is a documented distortion.

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    1936 Berlin Olympics opening ceremony

    also in World's fairs, festivals, and the age of spectacle

    Adolf Hitler's government used the Berlin Games as a propaganda showcase for Nazi Germany, staging a massive opening ceremony filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for her documentary Olympia. This Games introduced the Olympic torch relay from Olympia, Greece to the host city, an idea devised by sports official Carl Diem specifically for these Games and continued at every Olympics since. The event is documented as a deliberate use of mass spectacle for political image-building, separate from any conspiracy claims about the games.

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    The Berlin Olympics become a Nazi propaganda showcase

    also in Global sport as power: the Olympics and FIFA

    Nazi Germany hosts the Summer Games and uses elaborate ceremony, architecture, and Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia to project an image of national strength and unity to the world. The Games are documented as the clearest case of a state using the Olympics as deliberate soft-power propaganda, notwithstanding Jesse Owens's four gold medals undercutting the regime's racial claims.

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    Japan's Ministry of Education Publishes Kokutai no Hongi

    also in The military as an idea: violence, the state, and society

    Japan's Ministry of Education issued Kokutai no Hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Entity), a state-sponsored text promoting emperor worship, self-sacrifice, and military duty as the core of Japanese national identity. It was distributed widely in schools as part of a broader state effort to fuse Shinto ideology, imperial loyalty, and military expansion into official doctrine. The text is a documented example of state-driven militarist ideology in Imperial Japan during the lead-up to the Pacific War.

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    Anglo-American Trade Agreement signed

    The Anglo-American Trade Agreement signed on 2 November 1938 sent a clear message to Berlin.”’ As Britain and America celebrated their new unity of purpose, Goebbels issued strict instructions banning the German press from any comment implying that B

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    Nazi-Soviet pact and invasion of Poland

    Zuboff traces how just one week after propaganda whitewashed Stalin's regime, he signed a pact with Hitler, attacked Poland in September, and invaded Finland in November.

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    U.S. occupation of Japan

    also in Occupation Japan keeps the controls, Princes of the Yen: Japan built, bubbled, and broken

    The U.S. occupation, officially in charge until 1952, implemented reeducation and democratization, providing Japan with a new constitution, political parties, free elections including for women, and a market-oriented capitalist system.

    • The U.S. occupation, officially in charge until 1952—longer than in Germany—implemented the U.S. program of reeducation and democratization of the Japanese people.
      Princes of the Yen
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    The Batuni Oath and the Fighters' Discipline contested

    also in Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning

    Beyond the mass unity oath, committed fighters took a warrior or batuni oath binding them to take up arms and follow the movement's discipline. Colonial propaganda portrayed the oaths as depraved and satanic to discredit the movement, while participants described them as solemn commitments rooted in Kikuyu custom. The lurid colonial descriptions shaped Western perceptions of Mau Mau and were used to justify harsh countermeasures. The true content of the more advanced oaths remains contested between these opposed sources.

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    Askwith designs the detention "Pipeline"

    also in Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning

    Community development officer Thomas Askwith drafted the colonial rehabilitation program in 1953, coining the term "Pipeline" for the system of camps. Detainees were classed "white," "grey," or "black" and were meant to progress from detention through confession and re-education toward release, though in practice the system became punitive.

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    Bantu Education Act imposes segregated schooling

    also in South Africa: a deep history

    The Bantu Education Act placed African schooling under direct state control, designed by architect Hendrik Verwoerd to provide Black children with an inferior curriculum suited, in his words, to their place in society. The act shut down most mission schools that had previously educated Black South Africans. It entrenched vast disparities in funding and quality between white and Black education for decades.

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    Bernays and United Fruit in the Guatemala coup

    Working for the United Fruit Company, Bernays helped spread the claim that Guatemala faced communist subversion. Editor Mark Crispin Miller notes this served the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz.

    • Bernays was then employed by the United Fruit Company, at whose behest the Eisenhower administration used the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz.
      Propaganda
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    Kimathi stages photographs for the colonial police

    also in Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning

    In 1953, after the CID complained it had no picture of the Mau Mau leader, Kimathi staged two photographs and had them delivered to the Nyeri police station. The East African Standard published a cropped version as propaganda against him.

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    Lari massacre becomes a turning point of the Mau Mau war

    also in Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning

    In March 1953 the village of Lari saw two massacres within hours: a Mau Mau attack that killed an estimated seventy-four people, and a retaliatory reprisal by Home Guard and British forces that killed an estimated 150 or more. British propagandists used images of the victims to turn opinion against Mau Mau.

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    The Kapenguria trial of Kenyatta contested

    also in The Mau Mau oath: how a sacred rite bound a movement

    In a trial at the remote town of Kapenguria, Jomo Kenyatta and five others were convicted in April 1953 of managing Mau Mau, a case that turned heavily on claims that he directed the oathing. Kenyatta denied any link to the oath, and the main witness who tied him to it, Rawson Macharia, later admitted his evidence was false. Historians widely regard the trial as politically driven and the verdict as unsafe. Whether Kenyatta controlled the oath remains contested, and the state's certainty on the point was itself part of the propaganda.

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    Binding by transgression, and the colonial propaganda

    also in The Mau Mau oath: how a sacred rite bound a movement

    Later and more advanced oaths, taken by a smaller core, are documented to have included acts meant to bind people by making them cross a moral line, so that having done the forbidden they could not turn back. Colonial officials, settler newspapers, and the government's own 1960 Corfield Report seized on this and described the oaths as "bestial" and sexually depraved, painting the whole movement as a descent into savagery. Scholars such as Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale treat these lurid descriptions as wartime propaganda meant to justify harsh repression, not as a reliable record of practice. The honest account keeps both facts: some oaths used transgression to bind, and the colonial state greatly exaggerated this to serve its own ends.

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    The Colonial Propaganda of the Bestial Oath

    also in Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning

    Colonial officials, settlers, and some writers described the advanced oaths in lurid detail, alleging rites involving menstrual blood, sexual acts, corpses, and cannibalism to paint Mau Mau as a descent into savagery. The colonial psychiatrist J. C. Carothers cast the movement as a form of mass mental disorder in an influential 1954 report. These accounts, drawn largely from hostile observers and coerced confessions, are treated by historians as propaganda that dehumanized the Kikuyu and helped justify detention, villagization, and violence. The images they spread shaped Western views of Mau Mau for decades.

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    Colonial government distributes flyers hunting Kimathi

    also in Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning

    As Kimathi eluded capture, the colonial government stepped up its propaganda. In October 1954 it published thirty thousand flyers in Gikuyu asking whether people had seen Dedan Kimathi lately, hoping to restrict his movement.

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    The CIA overthrows Arbenz in Guatemala

    also in Client dictators: the strongmen the powers kept

    Elected president Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reform had seized unused United Fruit Company holdings, is forced out by a CIA operation code-named PBSUCCESS. The agency armed and directed a small exile force under Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas and backed it with a propaganda and air campaign. Declassified files confirm the operation, which opened decades of military rule and civil war.

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    Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz is overthrown in Operation PBSuccess

    also in Co-opt the moderate, bury the militant: the pattern of managed decolonization

    President Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reform had expropriated unused holdings of the American-owned United Fruit Company for redistribution, was forced out in a coup backed by the CIA under the codename Operation PBSuccess. The operation used an armed exile force, air raids, and a propaganda campaign to topple the elected government. Declassified United States records document the agency's planning and execution.

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    The coup topples Árbenz

    also in Banana republics: corporations and the coup

    A small CIA-backed force under Carlos Castillo Armas crosses into Guatemala while a propaganda campaign and air raids spread panic. The army refuses to defend the government, and Árbenz resigns and goes into exile. Castillo Armas took power, reversed the land reform, and returned the expropriated estates.

  129. new

    Eisenhower's 'open-skies' plan at Geneva Summit

    On the fourth day of the 1955 Geneva Summit, Eisenhower proposed his 'open-skies' plan for mutual aerial inspection and exchange of military blueprints. Quigley says it came to nothing but gave the United States a propaganda advantage.

    • This was his "open-skies" plan, which never came to anything but which gave the United States a propaganda advantage the Soviet Union could not overcome.
      Tragedy and Hope , p. 841-843
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    The Suez Crisis exposes limits on parliamentary oversight of war powers

    also in Parliament: its rise and how it gets hijacked

    Prime Minister Anthony Eden orders British military intervention in Egypt alongside France and Israel without full parliamentary debate beforehand, and later admits misleading the Commons about secret collusion with Israel. The episode becomes a textbook case, studied by constitutional scholars, of executive action outrunning parliamentary scrutiny even in a mature parliamentary democracy.

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    The Sino-Soviet split fractures the communist world

    also in The Cold War

    Ideological and national rivalry drives Communist China and the Soviet Union apart, ending their alliance and by 1969 leading to armed border clashes. The split shattered the image of a single monolithic communist bloc and later opened the way for Nixon's opening to China.

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    Fulbright-Hays Act expands cultural diplomacy

    also in Scholarships and the machinery of empire

    Congress passed the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act, known as the Fulbright-Hays Act, broadening the legal and funding basis for US educational and cultural exchange programs. The act placed exchange activity more firmly under the direction of the US Information Agency, which used it explicitly as a Cold War tool for winning favor abroad. Fulbright himself later grew critical of this closer link between the program and government propaganda efforts.

  138. new

    The School of the Americas trains Latin American officers

    also in Client dictators: the strongmen the powers kept

    The US Army's School of the Americas trains thousands of Latin American soldiers, many of whom returned to serve in militaries that carried out coups and repression. Graduates included figures later tied to abuses, and manuals released in 1996 were found to have described coercive interrogation. Critics link the training to later atrocities, while defenders argue the school's curriculum did not cause them; the causal claim is disputed.

  139. new

    Sino-Soviet split becomes unbridgeable, 1964

    After years of escalating ideological accusations, by 1964 the split within the world Communist movement between Moscow and Peking appeared beyond repair.

    • By 1964 the split within the Communist movement seemed unbridgeable.
      Tragedy and Hope , p. 976-978
    • In September 1964, Pravda readers were shocked to see a report that Mao was not only claiming back the Asian territories which the Chinese Empire had lost to Russia in the nineteenth century
      The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
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    Cultural Revolution

    also in China: dynasties to superpower

    Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge rivals and revive radical ideology. A decade of political turmoil followed, with mass persecution and attacks on traditional culture and religion.

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    The Arusha Declaration commits Tanzania to socialism and self-reliance

    also in Kenya capitalism versus Tanzania Ujamaa

    TANU issued the Arusha Declaration in February 1967, making socialism and self-reliance the ideological centre of Tanzania under Julius Nyerere. Unlike Kenya, Tanzania openly attacked capitalist accumulation by leaders, called for public control of major means of production and built Ujamaa as a national development doctrine.

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    East LA Walkouts (Chicano Blowouts)

    also in The oppression of Mexican Americans

    Over a period of about a week, an estimated 15,000 to 22,000 Mexican American students walked out of several East Los Angeles high schools to protest overcrowded classrooms, corporal punishment, a curriculum that ignored Mexican American history, and low college-attendance rates. The walkouts, organized with teacher Sal Castro and student activists, are widely regarded as a founding event of the Chicano Movement and led to some of the organizers, including Castro, facing conspiracy charges that were later dropped.

  147. new

    Graduate students found the journal Concerned Demography

    In 1969, graduate students at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Cornell founded the journal Con- cerned Demography, complaining that “demographers are being used as ad- ministrators and public relations men...

    • In 1969, graduate students at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Cornell founded the journal Con- cerned Demography, complaining that “demographers are being used as ad- ministrators and public relations men for government family planning pro- grams around the world.”87 At the 1970 Population Association of America conference virtually the entire membership
      Fatal Misconception - The Struggle to Control World , p. 289-293
  148. new

    Assassination of Tom Mboya

    also in Jomo Kenyatta: from Johnstone Kamau to the verdict on independence, Kenya: from the Swahili coast to the republic

    Tom Mboya, a brilliant Luo trade unionist and cabinet minister seen as a likely future president, was shot dead on a Nairobi street. A Kikuyu man was convicted and hanged, but many Kenyans believed the order came from higher up, and the killing inflamed Luo-Kikuyu tensions that still mark Kenyan politics. It removed one of the few figures able to bridge the country's ethnic and ideological divides.

  149. new

    Kitson publishes Low Intensity Operations

    also in Special Branch and colonial political policing

    Frank Kitson published "Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping," synthesizing his experience in Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus into a general doctrine for combining intelligence, propaganda, and small-unit military action against insurgency and civil unrest. The book was widely read within the British Army and became controversial when Kitson's methods were associated with operations in Northern Ireland.

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    Mobutu entrenches his Western-backed rule as Zaire

    also in Co-opt the moderate, bury the militant: the pattern of managed decolonization

    Mobutu renamed the country Zaire and deepened a personal dictatorship built around an ideology of national authenticity. He continued to receive Western aid and diplomatic support as a reliable anti-communist partner, even as the state and economy decayed around a small ruling circle. His long survival is a documented example of a compliant strongman kept in place through the Cold War.

  152. new

    T. Dan Smith Arrested

    also in Freemasonry and the councils

    T. Dan Smith, the former leader of Newcastle City Council and a dominant figure in North East regeneration politics, was arrested on corruption charges tied to the Poulson bankruptcy disclosures. Smith had steered major contracts, including tower block housing, toward Poulson's firm while running a public relations company that Poulson paid. He had already been forced from public office after an earlier, unsuccessful prosecution in 1971.

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    T. Dan Smith Sentenced

    also in Freemasonry and the councils

    T. Dan Smith pleaded guilty to corruption at Leeds Crown Court and was sentenced to six years in prison for accepting payments from Poulson over several years, funnelled through his public relations firm. Andrew Cunningham, leader of Durham County Council and a senior trade union figure, was convicted in the same wave of Poulson-related trials. The convictions marked the effective end of Smith's political career and became the defining symbol of 1970s council corruption in Britain.

  155. new

    Mama Ngina Kenyatta and the Ivory Trade

    also in Jomo Kenyatta: from Johnstone Kamau to the verdict on independence

    The president's wife, Mama Ngina Kenyatta, built extensive interests in land, hotels, commercial farming, and trade, part of the ruling family's rise to become one of Kenya's largest property owners. During the poaching boom of the mid-1970s that gutted Kenya's elephant and rhino herds, she and members of the ruling circle were widely linked to a lucrative ivory and rhino-horn export trade; the traffic was documented in the press and touched on by a 1975 parliamentary inquiry, though the family's exact role was shielded from full investigation. The scale of wealth built while in office became a textbook case of what Jean-Francois Bayart called the 'politics of the belly,' the use of state power for private gain.

  156. new

    Carter signs the first covert-action finding to aid Afghan rebels

    also in Covert operations, coups, and blowback

    On July 3, 1979, months before the Soviet invasion, President Carter signed a presidential finding authorizing the CIA to spend just over $500,000 on propaganda, radios, medical supplies, and cash for the anticommunist Afghan rebels, funneled through Pakistan.

    • On July 3, 1979, Carter scrawled his name on a presidential “finding” required under a recent law intended to ensure White House control over CIA operations.
      Ghost Wars
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    Global Export of Salafi Ideology

    also in The Gulf and the oil monarchies

    Using oil wealth, Saudi Arabia funded mosques, schools, charities, and preachers spreading its religious doctrine across the Muslim world and beyond. Critics linked the campaign to the growth of hardline movements, though its scale and effects remain debated.

  159. new

    The 'same money funded both sides' idea is turned to propaganda

    also in Capital and the totalitarianisms: who funded Stalin and Hitler, How the West supported the Nazis: finance, appeasement, and Cold War bargains

    The claim that the same financiers backed both communism and fascism has been misused to revive the antisemitic charge of a secret Jewish banking conspiracy. Historians and Sutton's own finance-focused account give no support to that reading. The documented story is one of banks, firms, and states pursuing profit and advantage, not any ethnic or bloodline cabal.

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    Muller's World Core Curriculum contested

    also in The New Age and the prosperity gospel

    Robert Muller designed a World Core Curriculum for global education that he said drew on the teachings Alice Bailey attributed to a Tibetan master. It influenced some private Muller schools but was never a United Nations program, though critics often present it as one.

  162. new

    Hanson Trust takes over Imperial Group

    also in Asset stripping and the corporate raiders

    Hanson Trust won a hostile takeover of Imperial Group, a large British tobacco, food, and brewing conglomerate, after a bidding contest. Hanson quickly sold off Imperial's brewing and restaurant businesses and other divisions that did not fit its strategy, keeping the profitable tobacco core. The deal was a textbook example of Hanson's approach: buy a diversified group, then sell the pieces for more than the whole had cost.

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    Pittston miners' strike begins

    In a notable illustration of the applicability of the propaganda model, the nine-month-long Pittston miners’ strike that began in April 1989 was accorded much less attention, and less friendly treatme

    • In a notable illustration of the applicability of the propaganda model, the nine-month-long Pittston miners’ strike that began in April 1989 was accorded much less attention, and less friendly treatment, than the Soviet miners’ strikes of the summer of that same year.124 From 1977 through 1999, while the incomes of the top 1 percent of households grew by 84.8 percent and the top 10 percent by 44.6 percent, the bottom 60 percent lost ground and the income of the lowest 20 percent fell by 12.5 percent.125 Real hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees (i.e., the 80 percent of the workforce that holds working-class jobs) fell by 4.8 percent between 1973 and 1999.126 This, along with the adverse trend of social indicators in the same period,127 suggests that the welfare of the majority declined in this era of high employment, a “new economy,” and a spectacular upswing in the stock market.
      Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
  166. new
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    The RPF invades Rwanda

    also in Rwanda: from colonial race-making to Kagame

    In October 1990 the RPF crossed from Uganda into northern Rwanda, opening a civil war. Its founding commander Fred Rwigyema was killed in the first days, and Paul Kagame, recalled from a course in the United States, took over and rebuilt the force. The war deepened Hutu fears of a Tutsi return to power and gave extremists a rallying cry for the propaganda that followed.

  168. new

    Kangura and the Hutu Ten Commandments

    also in Rwanda: from colonial race-making to Kagame

    The extremist magazine Kangura published the so-called Hutu Ten Commandments, a set of rules branding Tutsi as enemies and Hutu who dealt with them as traitors. It cast Tutsi women as weapons and demanded Hutu solidarity against a supposed racial threat. The text became a template for the dehumanizing propaganda that prepared the ground for genocide.

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    African Lactase Persistence Evolves on Its Own

    also in The DNA of Kenya: what genetics says about the peoples

    The ability to digest milk as an adult was selected for among East African herders, but through different mutations than in Europe. Tishkoff and colleagues reported in Nature Genetics that three African variants near the lactase gene, distinct from the European one, rose to high frequency in a selective sweep over roughly the last 7,000 years. The oldest signal sat in Kenyan Nilo-Saharan and Tanzanian Afroasiatic herders. It is a textbook case of the same trait evolving twice, driven by a dairy diet.

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    Confucius Institutes pass 300 worldwide

    also in Scholarships and the machinery of empire

    The number of Confucius Institutes hosted at universities around the world passed 300, alongside hundreds of affiliated Confucius Classrooms in schools. The rapid expansion drew growing scrutiny in the United States and Europe over the institutes' funding structure, curriculum oversight, and ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Some universities began reviewing or ending their agreements around this period.

  173. new

    US universities begin closing Confucius Institutes

    also in Scholarships and the machinery of empire

    The University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University announced they were ending their Confucius Institute agreements, citing concerns over academic freedom and outside influence over curriculum and staffing decisions. The American Association of University Professors had issued a report the same year recommending universities either renegotiate or terminate their agreements. The closures marked the start of a broader wave of American institutions cutting ties with the program.

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    Unmarked graves and the papal apology in Canada

    also in The Catholic Church as a world power

    Ground-penetrating radar detected what were reported as hundreds of possible unmarked graves at former residential school sites, beginning at Kamloops. The findings drew global attention, and in 2022 Pope Francis traveled to Canada and apologized for the role of Church members in the abuse and destruction of Indigenous cultures.

  178. new

    Rosebud Sioux children's remains returned from Carlisle cemetery

    also in The oppression of Native Americans

    The U.S. Army, which maintains the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School cemetery, disinterred and returned the remains of nine Rosebud Sioux children who had died at the school in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The repatriation was part of a broader, ongoing effort by tribes to identify and recover children buried in unmarked or poorly documented graves at former boarding school sites across the country, following renewed public attention after unmarked grave discoveries at Canadian residential schools in 2021.

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Further reading

Change log

6 changes

  1. Linked to "Media, education, and information" as part of in this story

  2. Linked from "Media, education, and information" as parallel in this story

  3. Added "The Arusha Declaration commits Tanzania to socialism and self-reliance"

  4. Added "Samuelson's Economics mainstreams the Keynesian synthesis"

  5. Added "The divine right of kings"

  6. Added "Religion and ideology"

Crosses paths with