Randal Marlin (born 1938 in Washington, D.C.) is a Canadian retired philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who specializes in the study of propaganda.
The revised second edition, released in 2013, examines the Bush administration's use of propaganda based on fear to persuade Americans to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
[4] In 1998, Marlin published a book examining the public uproar following the appointment of a former separatist Quebec political candidate to the top administrator's post at the new Ottawa Hospital.
[6] The David Levine Affair draws on Marlin's knowledge of propaganda techniques that play on stereotypes as well as pre-existing fears, suspicions and resentments to incite intense emotional reactions.
Marlin says that in the midst of that campaign, he realized from reading Aristotle's Rhetoric that a vivid example can be much more persuasive than logical arguments, an insight reinforced by a fellow community activist.
[16] Therefore, Marlin defines propaganda as: The organized attempt through communication to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent or suppress an individual's adequately informed, rational, reflective judgment.
[19] He writes, for example, that during World War I, British propaganda accused German soldiers of publicly raping women in the town square, decapitating babies and forcing parents to watch as their children's hands and ears were cut off.
[20] The American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton resorted to atrocity propaganda during the 1990/91 Gulf War when it spread the story that the Iraqi soldiers who had invaded Kuwait were ripping helpless Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators.
[22] The Corpse Factory story incited hatred and loathing of Germans who were supposedly "boiling their own dead soldiers to extract from their bodies lubricating oil, fats, soap, glue, glycerine for explosives, bonemeal for animal feed, and fertilizer.
[25] Those requirements are: According to Marlin and Joachim Neander, the Corpse Factory story also illustrates other propaganda techniques including the use of deceptive language, appeal to emotion and the Big Lie.
[28] Marlin makes it clear in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, that George Orwell and Jacques Ellul strongly influenced his own writing.
He points to Newspeak, the language Orwell invented in his satirical novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to illustrate how words could reinforce the totalitarian power of a police state by eradicating historical memory and narrowing the range of thought.
[30] Marlin also refers to Orwell's famous 1946 essay Politics and the English Language which describes, for example, how a euphemism such as pacification served to cover up state violence and murder.
"[31] Marlin writes that Orwell showed how the owners of weekly magazines used adventure stories and comics to transmit capitalist and imperialist values partly through the repeated use of class and national stereotypes.
"What sets him apart from other analysts is his rare if not unique combination of expertise in history, sociology, law, and political science, along with careful study of biblical and Marxist writings.
In a review of Ellul's book The Technological Bluff, Marlin comments on "the obscene way in which American television lavished praise on smart bombs" during the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War "paying little attention to the human suffering they caused.
His 1986 review of Ellul's Money and Power, for example, concludes that it contains "a wealth of insight" adding, "[a]s Roman Catholics we have much to learn, and relearn, from this book.
Any time we subordinate human considerations to narrow economic exchange relationships --- ignoring the fact that cost-savings programmes cause widespread unemployment, for example --- we reveal a preoccupation with the wrong standpoint.
[43] After the news of Levine's appointment broke on May 1, 1998, outraged readers wrote record numbers of letters to Ottawa newspapers and flooded radio phone-in shows with angry calls.
[44] On May 19, 1998, the "hurricane of protest" drew national attention when a boisterous crowd confronted the hospital's board of directors in an Ottawa auditorium expressing "unmitigated fury" and referring to Quebec separatists as "anti-Canadians, bastards.
[46] In his analysis of the affair, Marlin criticizes the Ottawa media for fanning the flames of protest in their competitive pursuit of higher circulations and audience ratings.
[47] He also argues that although Canadians tend to regard McCarthyism as a feature of U.S. political life, the Levine affair contained its basic ingredients -- "a strident patriotism, which reduced complex questions to a simple us-and-them mentality.
According to a report in the Ottawa Citizen, many heckled the author, objecting to his contention that Levine's political views were irrelevant to his work as a hospital administrator.