Angeline S. Wijono
Professor Michael Dixon
English 1
27 May 2016
Propaganda Essay
The Truth behind the Threat
September 11, 2001 was the day when America felt its vulnerability, the day we experienced the horror. If you were told that someone had chemical weapons that could kill more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September the 11th, what would you do? Wouldn’t you be terrified? Wouldn’t you worry about the safety of your loved ones? This was how President Bush convinced the people that Iraq was a threat to the United States and to the world. According to President Bush’s speech in Cincinnati, the president used propaganda to sell war. In Cincinnati Museum Center, October 7, 2002, President George W. Bush
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This method is used in attempts to increase fear and prejudice toward the enemy. Fear is one of the most primordial human emotions and therefore lends itself to effective use by propagandists (Landman). The fear propaganda method was especially used by Machiavelli in his propaganda. He stated that to be feared was much safer than to be loved because love is fickle (506). Machiavelli also explained what he meant about why being feared was better:
People are less concerned with offending a man who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared: the reason is that love is a link of obligation which men, because they are rotten, will break any time they think doing so serves their advantage; but fear involves dread of punishment, from which they can never escape.
The way Bush used fear was by saying that Iraq possessed a massive stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that had never been accounted for and capable of killing millions. He claimed that Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundred of miles that were enough to strike other nations. It could even strike a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. The fear method was proved to be effective because people were afraid of the horrors that were to come if Saddam was not disarmed. By playing on the audience’s deep-seated fears, propagandists hope to redirect attention away from the merits of a particular proposal and toward steps than can be taken to reduce the fear