Survival

Global Politics and Strategy

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Violence as Propaganda

James P. Farwell

To cite this article: James P. Farwell (2012) Violence as Propaganda, Survival, 54:5, 203-214,
DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2012.728353

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Review Essay

Violence as Propaganda
James P. Farwell

The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New

Revolutionaries
Neville Bolt. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2012. £24.99/$29.50. 429 pp.

In his extensively researched The Violent Image, Neville Bolt wastes no time
in stating his objective: ‘I wish to update a late nineteenth-century theory of
insurgent violence and place it at the heart of the contemporary Information
Age’ (p. 1). Bolt’s interest is in the ‘propaganda of the deed’, defined as an
act of political violence that creates a media event whose aim is to energise
political revolution and social transformation.
By background a television producer and journalist, Bolt’s ambitious
goal is to fashion a conceptual framework around terrorist acts of violence
in today’s ‘image-driven media ecology’ (p. 9). He sees the propaganda of
the deed as the tool of a bottom-up social movement, driven by grievance
and a sense of injustice, that seeks to replace governments and effect social
change. Television and digital media, as part of a global media environ-
ment, provide channels to communicate images that magnify the impact of
violence and shock the system. According to Bolt, digital media offer a way
to use propaganda of the deed as a ‘strategic operating concept’, enabling
modern insurgents to bypass media owners and elite gatekeepers to reach
targeted audiences.1 Previously, such gatekeepers had the power to quell or
mute insurgency messages. Today, insurgents have more ways of present-

James P. Farwell is an attorney, defence consultant and expert in political and strategic communication. He
is the author of The Pakistan Cauldron: Conspiracy, Assassination & Instability (Potomac Books, 2011) and Power &
Persuasion (Georgetown University Press, 2012).

Survival | vol. 54 no. 5 | October–November 2012 | pp. 203–214DOI 10.1080/00396338.2012.728353

204 | James P. Farwell

ing carefully constructed narratives that seek to define a credible rationale

for their cause.

Striking the right chord

The ideas of Tony Schwartz, the legendary New York political consultant, set
the stage for Bolt’s fine scholarship, even if Bolt spends little time discussing
them. In The Responsive Chord, Schwartz famously argued that the secret to
persuasion lies less in what is said than in finding ‘the responsive chord’ – a
mixture of signals that resonates with material already stored in the minds
of an audience. Writing in 1973, Schwartz recognised that our perception of
the world had shifted away from print toward an auditory and visual base.
He believed that when watching television, the eye fractures visual images
into bits of information for the brain to reassemble.
Schwartz believed that TV fosters violence and conditions people to
respond instantly to the stimuli in their lives. Constant exposure to visual
images of violence creates a reservoir of common media experiences that
are stored as memories. Shared media experiences overwhelm individual
ones. Thus, a violent act may trigger a collective response from a group of
demonstrators who share the same media experiences.
The communicator’s challenge is not to provide information or even to
package stimuli that people can absorb. Instead, Schwartz argued, it is to
‘deeply understand the kinds of information and experiences stored in his
audience, the patterning of this information, and the interactive resonance
process whereby stimuli evoke this stored information’.2
Schwartz applied his notions brilliantly to his television and radio ads.
Most famous is the Daisy ad, created for Lyndon Johnson’s re-election cam-
paign in 1964. Shown only once to a national US political audience during
a broadcast of ‘Monday Night at the Movies’, it remains the most powerful
political spot ever produced.3 Daisy opens with a little girl picking petals off
a daisy. She’s counting aloud. The image freezes as her count reaches ten.
There is a countdown as the camera zooms in on her eye, and then there is
a nuclear explosion. The voice of President Johnson pronounces: ‘These are
the stakes, to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into
the darkness. Either we must love each other or we must die.’
 Review Essay | 205

As Bolt understands, the response Daisy evoked among its viewers was
emotional (pp. 71, 124–5). The violent imagery resonated with viewers’
deepest fears about nuclear war, activating their stored memories and chan-
nelling these to achieve a specific effect: causing them to wonder whether
Barry Goldwater, Johnson’s Republican opponent, had an itchy finger on
the nuclear trigger. Schwartz understood that in political communication,
reason persuades, but emotion is what motivates. Few communicators have
so adroitly put his notion into practice.
Bolt’s achievement in The Violent Image is to show
how insurgents can and do employ the same principles
of communication as professional political communica-
tors. He reveals how insurgent groups such as the Irish
Republican Army,4 for example, reconfigure memories to
build a narrative that gives legitimacy to their violence.
As novelist William Landay observed, ‘historical truth, if
it exists in the first place, is immediately lost in a fog of
bad eyesight, bad memory, bad reporting’.5 This leaves
room for insurgents to artfully rearrange memories into
narratives that serve their cause. In other words, insur-
gents ‘fight for control of the past in order to legitimize
their role in the present and stake their claim to the future’ (p. 81).
All political or strategic communication campaigns require a story, or
narrative. From these flow themes and messages that tap into the deeply
held values of the targeted audience, moulding and shaping their attitudes
and opinions and influencing their behaviour. Bolt argues that a key to a
successful campaign lies in rooting the narrative in a memory constructed
for audiences that helps them to make sense of the past, shapes personal
identity and provides a world view. According to him, the propaganda of
the deed breaks through the constraints imposed by elite- or state-controlled
media, connecting acts of violence in the minds of individuals and groups
to form ‘carefully crafted memories of grievance’ (p. 54). This is not about
simply reinforcing ideology. Rather, this type of propaganda entails rooting
violence in new narratives that spawn a revolutionary memory. Some ele-
ments of personal memory are constructed from unreliable fragments of the
206 | James P. Farwell

past, some are directly experienced, and some pre-date a person’s existence.
The aim is to mobilise populations by tapping into the memories that can
form a narrative with which the target audience identifies.
As anyone dealing with countering violent extremism knows, using
violence to define a narrative risks alienating audiences. Bolt believes that
tolerance for violence depends on the nature of the conflict. He glosses over
this point too easily, although he acknowledges that parties such as the
Taliban, which see that risk, have often disclaimed responsibility for their
terrorist actions.
The fact is, while violence commands attention and can destabilise a
society, more often than not it eventually backfires on its sponsors. Iraqi
terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi drew fierce criticism from al-Qaeda leader
Ayman al-Zawahiri for killing Muslim civilians.6 Indiscriminate violence
undercut the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria. Scholars such as Fawaz
Gerges have powerfully argued that 9/11 was a debacle for Osama bin Laden,
and that only the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003 revived al-Qaeda’s for-
tunes in the wake of uniform global revulsion over the attack.7 Pakistanis
resent US drone attacks, yet polling consistently reveals that overwhelming
majorities are extremely hostile to violent extremists.8
As Bolt observes, pictures speak louder than words, but violence rarely
offers insurgents a path to victory unless their efforts are driven by credible
ideas that engender mass support. As in Syria, violence can shake a regime
and communicate to dissenters that victory is plausible, but success usually
requires articulating a credible narrative and rationale that defines a posi-
tive alternative to the status quo. Syrian rebels are united in their opposition
to Bashar al-Assad, but the absence of a broader unifying theme raises the
spectre of chaos if and when the regime collapses.
Indeed, the principal weakness of virtually every violent insurgent
group, from al-Qaeda to Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, Colombia’s FARC to
Peru’s Shining Path, lies in their abject failure to lay out a positive vision
for what they stand for. That makes them vulnerable to competing mes-
sages. Al-Qaeda has suffered from opponents’ success in framing conflict
against the group as a choice between a future rooted in freedom, hope,
security and opportunity and one rooted in violence, fear, despair and
 Review Essay | 207

oppression. Violence may help insurgents shock a system, but makes them
highly vulnerable to well-conceived and -executed counter-narratives that
de-legitimise and marginalise them.
In his conclusion, Bolt acknowledges the limits of his argument about the
impact of violence as propaganda. Violence may challenge political elites,
but offers no guarantee of political transformation. Still, he is correct that
insurgencies must maximise limited tactical resources, and that today’s new
media provide a new dimension for the use of violence to make provoca-
tive political statements. The shock to the system that such statements can
provide may even allow groups to alter the status quo if they are prepared
to take advantage of the opportunity.

Questioning the narrative

When Bolt considers whether spontaneity and fluidity can replace organised
mobilisation – Vladimir Lenin, for one, believed that a vanguard exerting
tight control at the top was vital to a successful revolution – he begins with
criticism of US President Barack Obama’s handling of the attack on Osama
bin Laden. Bolt thinks the administration missed its opportunity to control
the story. He must have watched different media reports than everyone else.
Obama’s team drew sharp criticism for revealing too many operational
details about the attack. But the White House was on its game in commu-
nicating a portrait of a commander-in-chief willing to take courageous
decisions and making good on America’s promise that it would track down
bin Laden, no matter how long it took. Bolt takes too seriously a few reports
that some thought the man described as bin Laden was a local nobody.
That idea gained scant traction. More important was the political blowback
deriving from differences in perspective between Americans and Pakistanis.
Americans summarised the attack in two words: mission accomplished.
Pakistanis raged about breaches of sovereignty and a sense that the attack
had left them in the untenable position of looking complicit had they known
that bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad, but incompetent if they did not.
Most of Bolt’s chapter on the question of control vs spontaneity deals with
the Egyptian revolution. Bolt argues that cascading events, driven by sponta-
neous, mass outpourings of public sentiment fuelled by Twitter and Facebook,
208 | James P. Farwell

illustrate how mass dissent can outpace a government’s ability to respond

effectively. His point about the power of social media is valid, although al-
Jazeera’s images of violence played a pivotal role in stirring dissent.
Bolt ponders whether a leaderless revolution might prevail through
horizontal, networked communication that allows key actors to conceal
their identities. But Egypt’s revolution was not leaderless. The Muslim
Brotherhood, along with well-publicised leaders of the April 6 Movement,
filled that role, although initially there was no way of knowing what their
efforts would achieve. As it happened, the military realised that it was
time for then-President Hosni Mubarak to go, and showed him the door.
Consequently, many feel that Egypt’s change resulted from a bloodless
military coup more than social upheaval. The better interpretation is that
a confluence of these factors is what produced, and continues to produce,
political change. The recent elections and the current conflict over what
roles the military, parliament and the new president will play have been
driven by leaders, not a leaderless mass.
Another aspect of Bolt’s analysis, his description of propaganda in a
broader sense, is too categorical. He understands that propaganda comes
in different shades, but his declaration that propagandists ‘conceal their
true intentions, if not occasionally their identity’ (p. 33) reflects the rela-
tively recent consensus, coloured by memories of Nazi Germany, that
propaganda is the tool of the foul fiend. Today, labelling communication
‘propaganda’ usually undercuts its credibility. Historically, however, schol-
arly experts have differed on propaganda’s moral legitimacy, with many
taking a neutral stance. Yale Law Professor Harold Laswell considered
propaganda an act of manipulation, but never argued that it was inher-
ently evil.9 Phil Taylor, professor of International Communications at the
University of Leeds, felt that propaganda could be good or evil, depending
upon the intent. ‘Propaganda’, he observed, ‘uses communication to convey
a message, an idea, or an ideology that is designed to serve the self-interests
of the person or persons doing the communicating’.10
During the Second World War, playwright Robert Sherwood, director of
the Office of War Informaton, had no compunction about invoking the term
to describe communications that supported or advocated American values
 Review Essay | 209

or ideals. During the Korean War, General Matthew Ridgeway embraced

the use of leaflets, which he bluntly characterised as propaganda, against
the Communists. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower established a
committee headed by New York businessman William Jackson to forge a
communication strategy for defeating the Soviets. Endorsing psychological
operations, the Jackson Committee explicitly embraced propaganda – and
the need for truth. Quite rightly, the two were not seen as incompatible.
Today, the Pentagon’s disdainful view of propaganda is nevertheless
not as categorical as Bolt’s: in recent publications, propaganda is defined as
communication conducted by an adversary.11 Yet adversarial communica-
tions need not be biased or misleading to qualify as propaganda. The debate
matters: in national-security circles, how one characterises a strategic com-
munication – and propaganda is strategic communication – may affect who
has the authority to do what.

Substance over style

More curious is Bolt’s notion of political consulting. He calls it ‘political mar-
keting’. British consultants may use that term to describe their work (Bolt
is currently based at King’s College, University of London), but American
consultants think differently. A model that Bolt takes seriously, apparently
formulated by Jennifer Lees-Marshment of the University of Auckland, that
distinguishes between three approaches to political marketing would be
unfamiliar to experienced political operatives and media consultants in the
United States. Political campaigns vary among different nations and in dif-
ferent systems, but American consultants handle a significant number of the
election campaigns held around the world, and their core world view about
political dynamics is pretty consistent. Most would agree that one should
avoid confusing commercial marketing with political campaign com-
munication. American presidential campaigns have occasionally tapped
commercial ad people as members of the media teams, but success has been
mixed. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s campaign has recruited a handful of com-
mercial ad-makers to its team to provide creative input, but they operate
under the supervision of experienced, top-flight political media experts, not
as a substitute for them.
210 | James P. Farwell

In politics, character counts and ideas matter. Voters make decisions on

candidates, parties and their policies differently than they do on consumer
products. Bolt’s declaration that ‘the production of the correct imagery is
politically more significant that the creation and execution of policy’ (p. 39)
is, generally speaking, not correct.
Bolt leaves the impression that political campaigns now borrow from
the techniques of product marketing. Actually, the converse is true, though
that doesn’t eliminate the distinctions between them. Commercial market-
ers, driven by market research, attribute qualities to products and sell the
products based upon those qualities. People don’t buy toothpaste; they buy
teeth whiter than white. Coca-Cola is a great soft drink, but the advertising
sells an attributed lifestyle. Ads for alcohol are about created identity. On
the other hand, there is a word for political campaigns that construct quali-
ties for candidates or parties out of whole cloth and present them to voters
in image-driven ‘branding’ campaigns: losers. Political communication is
about candidates, ideas, campaigns and parties. It is complex (though less
so than Bolt suggests), and often difficult. That is just as true of campaigns
to counter violent extremism as it is of campaigns on behalf of political can-
didates. Former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
Charlotte Beers enjoyed a distinguished career in advertising. In mounting
the failed ‘Shared Values’ campaign targeted at foreign Muslim audiences,
however, she came to grief because of her failure to understand the differ-
ence between marketing products and articulating a credible rationale for
political ideas.
Winning a political campaign begins with defining the candidate. Voters
are interested in real people. They judge candidates as three-dimensional
figures, not constructs of an art director’s fantasy. Voters examine profes-
sional qualifications, family, accomplishments, character, track record,
vision, skills, sincerity, honesty, willingness to listen, strength and integrity
in deciding whether they like or dislike a candidate. The political environ-
ment shapes the qualities campaigns emphasise. Candidates match their
personal and political strengths to the demands of the times, and match
their policies to problems that people want solved. Their communications
seek to demonstrate that they have the strength and power to implement
 Review Essay | 211

changes and policies that improve lives, allay fears, inspire hope and create
opportunity.
In building his argument, Bolt cites a British Labour Party campaign
that used John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’. Without having seen the video he
describes, I would bet that its resonance rested upon what Labour leaders
had argued day-in and day-out. A hallmark of Britain’s parliamentary
system is that the leaders of political parties stay in place for relatively long
periods. They are in the news. British voters have a much longer opportu-
nity, compared with Americans, to judge the parties and their leaders. As
Yogi Berra noted, you can observe a lot by watching.
The two best Labour videos I have seen were for Neil Kinnock in 1987 and
for Labour’s last, successful effort in 2005 to retain power through a strategy
that presented Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as a leadership team. Both
featured the leaders speaking, or giving ‘testimonials’. That both videos,
especially the adroitly executed Blair/Brown video directed by Anthony
Minghella (who won an Academy Award for directing The English Patient),
were well produced in no way diminishes their content, which remains
faithful to the precepts of political communication.
Another campaign cited by Bolt – Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in
America’– is one with which I am very familiar. Bolt misapprehends it. The
strategy forged for that campaign emerged amid vigorous debate between
two brilliant strategists, pollster Dick Wirthlin and Reagan’s chief of staff,
Jim Baker. Reagan’s first term had been successful. Baker urged that the
re-election campaign be rooted in the track record. Wirthlin argued that
that could fail, as voters make decisions based upon expectations for the
future – they vote based upon hopes, dreams and fears. Wirthlin’s view pre-
vailed. The imagery selected by the campaign illustrated the message that
Reagan’s success in his first term meant that Americans could look forward
to a future filled with hope, confidence and opportunity. The images were
well chosen, but the message is what counted. Two years later, in 1986, a
handful of Republican Senate candidates misread Reagan’s campaign and
fell into the trap of mistaking image for policy substance. They lost.
More typical of modern campaigns, and not just in the United States,
are tough-minded attack ads that are driven by a strategic approach and
212 | James P. Farwell

mindset quite different from that usually seen in commercial marketing.

Indeed, the 2012 US presidential election has been defined by sharply nega-
tive ads. Although some doubt whether such ads can cause movement in
the polls, top strategist Richard Galen has argued that negative advertising
by the Obama campaign in around a dozen states has ‘kept him in the game’
and that, without it, the race might have been over by now.12 Moreover, both
sides seek to give their narratives credibility, much as Bolt suggests violent
insurgents do, by rooting them in constructed memories of history for tar-
geted audiences.
Winning a campaign requires not only persuading voters that someone
is a good leader or that a party has wise policies, but defining for them
what the fight is about. It’s about defining the choice. As Joe Gaylord, one of
the top political consultants in the United States, has stated, the issues that
define most elections ‘tend to revolve around the size and scope of govern-
ment; the resources required to run government (e.g., spending, deficits,
taxes); the rate of change as societies move to a global economy; the impor-
tance of personal security in neighborhoods, cities, states, and country; and
the amount of personal freedom voters are willing to surrender in exchange
for personal security’.13
Defining the choice is equally vital in countering the ideologies of violent
extremism. The fact is, political communication is far more complex than
commercial advertising, and requires more sensitive strategic judgements.
Insurgents understand that. Violence against Muslims, often articulated
through false or distorted images, aims to inspire revulsion against the West
and support for al-Qaeda. Violence against Western troops in Afghanistan
and US troops in Iraq was employed to build support and draw recruits
by communicating the idea that insurgents could prevail. The images are
content driven. Violence may shock and awe, but the impact is rooted in the
ideas upon which it rests.

* * *

Despite these caveats and criticisms, Bolt’s book merits high praise for its
exceptional scholarship. The author has rigorously examined a compli-

cated, nuanced topic. His research is illuminating and thoughtful, and he
offers fine insights. The Violent Image is an outstanding contribution to the
literature on how parties use violence for political ends, and the strategic
implications of such action.
Notes
1 See in particular Chapter 8, ‘The New
Strategic Operating Concept’, pp.
227–55.
2 Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord
(New York: Anchor Books, 1973), p. 25.
3 Daisy is discussed at greater length
in James P. Farwell, ‘The Power of
Jihadi Video’, Survival, vol. 52, no.
6, December 2012–January 2011, pp.
127–50.
4 During the Irish Republican Army’s
conflict with the British, the legitimacy
of the position that each faction took
depended to a large extent on how
each constructed narratives rooted in
the long Irish struggle.
5 William Landay, Mission Flats (New
York: Delacorte Press, 2003), p. 297.
6 Susan B. Glasser and Walter Pincus,
‘Seized Letter Outlines Al Qaeda
Goals in Iraq’, Washington Post, 12
October 2005, http://www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101353.
html. The criticism came from a 6,000-
word letter from Osama bin Laden’s
chief deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, that
blasted Abu Musab Zarqawi for
attacking Iraqi civilians, a tactic that
Zawahiri correctly forecast would
backfire against al-Qaeda.
Review Essay | 213
7 See Fawaz A. Gerges, The Rise and
Fall of al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
8 See James P. Farwell, The Pakistan
Cauldron: Conspiracy, Assassination and
Instability (Washington DC: Potomac
Books, 2011).
9 See Harold Lasswell, Politics: Who
Gets What, When and How (Gloucester,
MA: Peter Smith Publisher, 1990) and
‘Laswell’s Model in Communication
Models’, Communication Theory,
http://communicationtheory.org/
lasswells-model/comment-page-1/.
10 Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the
Mind: A History of Propaganda from
the Ancient World to the Present
Day (Manchester: University of
Manchester, 2003, 3rd ed.), pp. 13–14.
11 Department of Defense, Dictionary
of Military and Associated Terms, Joint
Publication 1-02, p. 254, http://www.
dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.
pdf; see also Psychological Operations,
Joint Publication 3-13.2, 7 January
2010, http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/
dod/jp3-13-2.pdf.
12 E-mail exchange and conversations
with Rich Galen, July 2012.
13 Telephone interview with Joseph
Gaylord, 2012.
214 | James P. Farwell