The Poison in Old Pictures

Old Propaganda Still Works Today

Does propaganda have an expiry date? Does it lose its force with time, or does it work on us like a slow-acting poison — subtly, beneath the skin, beyond our conscious control? New research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology suggests that historical propaganda can still manipulate human emotion, even decades after it was created.

The authors of the study asked contemporary Germans to look at photographs of Nazi crimes, sometimes “softened” by propaganda images of a smiling, “human” Hitler. The result was unsettling. The combination weakened feelings of guilt and shame.

When the researchers combined data from several experiments, they found a broader effect: negative emotions fell, while positive ones, including calm and optimism, rose. In other words, images created to warm the public image of a dictator still “work.” They soothe, pacify, and normalize.

Emotion Outweighs Memory and Knowledge

How can propaganda designed for unsuspecting audiences in the 1930s still affect people raised on textbooks and films about the Holocaust? And why does it still reach those who know perfectly well what crimes hid behind that gentle smile on a poster?

Why Propaganda Works: Emotion Blinds the Facts

The simplest answer is this: human nature is emotional. And emotion very often outweighs memory and knowledge.

We are creatures who search for narratives that offer comfort and meaning. Propaganda offers simplicity: a clean division between heroes and enemies, a vision of glory in place of the chaos of truth. Even if we reject its content intellectually, its form — the smile, the pathos, the feeling of belonging — can still act on our emotions and associations.

Propaganda does not demand intellectual effort. In a world flooded with information, it is easier to surrender to an emotional message than to verify every detail. People want to believe in narratives that give them pride, safety, or belonging. This is not a matter of intelligence. It is a matter of the human condition. Even the most educated historians admit that certain images can touch something deep in the soul before critical judgment has time to awaken.

Collective Memory Is an Emotional Landscape

From a philosophical point of view, propaganda interferes with collective memory not only through what it says, but through what it allows us to feel about the past. If images glorifying a dictator soften shame and guilt, then in practice they modify how we experience history, even if the facts remain unchanged. History, after all, is not only a chronicle of events. It is also an emotional landscape: a map of our fears, wounds, and smoothed-over memories.

In The Republic, Plato described people in a cave, watching shadows on a wall and taking them for reality. Propaganda works in a similar way. It casts controlled shadows on the screen of our collective memory. Even when we leave the cave and see the sun of facts, those shadows still shape how we interpret the world.

Propaganda as Part of the Human Condition

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

Edward Bernays wrote those words in his 1928 book Propaganda.

Bernays made no secret of the fact that propaganda, or its more modern version, public relations, is a tool for shaping mass opinion. Today, when we look at old films by Leni Riefenstahl or Soviet posters, we see how those mechanisms survived. They did not disappear. They merely wait for the next viewer.

Why does propaganda still work today? Because it is not only a political tool. It is part of the human condition. It has no expiry date because it operates at a level that reaches beyond time and rationality. There is no guarantee that we, as a society, will ever “grow out of” our susceptibility to propaganda, because we do not grow out of the need for meaning, community, and relief from guilt.

Critical thinking alone will not protect us unless it also reaches into what we want to feel about the world. Perhaps the only real defense lies in consciously preserving difficult emotions: shame, grief, unease. Only when we understand how deeply emotion shapes belief can we begin to grasp why propaganda works, and how to resist both old and new forms of manipulation.

Read this article in Polish: Stare obrazy, nowe emocje. Dlaczego propaganda działa po latach?