When worlds collide: Power & Philately

Part of the fragile framework holding together a country's mythos, postage stamps have long served as a form of propaganda.

Disclaimer: This isn’t TikTok. It’s not Instagram, it’s not Twitter, and it’s not any of the other soul-sucking, concentration-killing platforms currently enamouring our youth. This is Substack, where many of today’s erudite Internet dwellers prefer to opine (at least at lengths greater than 280 characters).

We long-form writers take great responsibility in our role as your attention span’s esteemed yet sorely underused endurance trainer.

But be warned. Your unbridled brain holds vast power. If you start paying too much attention, the road ahead will be an onerous one. How can you relish your role as an environmental saviour while sorting your plastic and paper refuse if you know recycling is an uneconomical cesspit of lies and inefficiences?¹ It’s unpleasant awakening to the manipulation, corruption, violence and suffering beset upon the world by elites of all stripes and persuasions for what are often financial or power-seeking motives. When you exhibit this level of understanding, family gatherings will never be the same.

Power & Philately assumes no responsiblity for the mental suffering and despair accompanying any newfound awareness you may achieve while reading these stories.

Welcome to Power & Philately

Believe it or not, you’ve stumbled upon a blog² about postage stamps as propaganda.

At times, it may seem ponderous – or worse yet portentous – but I strive to be the antithesis of the pithy, meaningless word vomit you may read elsewhere on the web. My occasionally prolix prose will keep away all the spineless, weak-minded cowards whose presence could spell ruin for our community of artfully radical exclusion. In a weekly test of your attention, only the staunchest among you will remain fixed on these pages. Hopefully, it will also lend to a vibrant and insightful comment section.

As we wind through the weeks, the months and maybe even the years, you’ll read stories about nations old and new, about mass society, about crowd psychology, about prejudice and about war—and all through the lens of philately.³

The series, triumphantly titled Power & Philately: Myth-Making With Miniature Works of Art, will appear about once a week. Each story will explore some facet of stamps or postal history as propaganda. I’ll always bow to this supreme subject matter, but my application of the theme – philatelic propaganda – will remain fairly loose as I try to engage a more general readership. With philately as the backdrop, my stories will focus more on the political persuasions dictating our lives than the remarkable bits of paper used to facilitate global communication for more than a century. Someday, in addition to my weekly stories and depending on demand, I might launch a guest-focused podcast or an educational video series digging deeper into some of these topics.

For now, my above-all goal is to soak up all the great research on philatelic propaganda, repurpose it for a predominantly general audience and disseminate it far and wide so we all have something juicy to discuss. Collector or non-collector, you should enjoy your time here—especially if you identify as a logophile.⁴

I'll try to keep the stories short (or at least separate them into digestible chunks of about 1,000 words, a potentially difficult limit by which to abide). Decades of studies in the social sciences and humanities have given us stacks of intriguing findings on the semiotics of stamps, including in the realm of propaganda, so there’s no shortage of content at our disposal. With postal history thrown into the mix, the possibilities are seemingly endless. In keeping with best practices, I’ll include all relevant sources and recommended reading in the footnotes for you to enjoy.

Now, it’s time for me to scamper from the introduction to my inaugural story (yes, there’s a story to follow this prolonged prelude). Please consider your comments, to which I remain splayed and eager to receive. Let me know how things are coming through on your end. Do you have suggestions? Corrections? Words of support? Bitter criticism about your wasted time? Comment below.

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Canadian, U.S. and British stamps provide a playbook for the three countries' national identities.

Defining propaganda

The venerable Encyclopedia Britannica defines propaganda as "the dissemination of information – facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies – to influence public opinion."

"Propaganda is the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols," adds the definition.

It lists several tangible and intangible expressions of this official, often surreptitious, indoctrination from above.

Propaganda can manifest through intangible means, including mere ideas—the original memes. These memes float through the public’s awkward and ever-changing collective consciousness, an often-unwieldy mass tasked with upholding democracy (at least in our part of the world, at least for now).

By contrast, propaganda’s many tangible manifestations, which exist in the physical realm, allow us greater insight into the true intentions of past propagandizers. Examples include all the most repulsive gestures; intimidating banners and monuments; patriotic photographs, films and songs; conforming clothing and hairstyles—plus everyday items such as stamps and coins.

(Governments can also leverage people, both individuals and the masses, for propaganda purposes. While propaganda can manoeuvre public opinion – after all, it’s the focus of this blog – it can be a cumbersome process. It’s easier for nefarious entities to spin a yarn using faulty generalizations about the general public as it exists in its natural state. For example, the world's impression of German society’s apparent order, prosperity and unity in the mid-1930s served great propaganda value to the Nazi Party, which used the public to help prove its ostensibly good intentions.)

Today, the most common methods of influencing public opinion and shaping societal behaviour in the Western world include advertising, political messaging, social media campaigns, government-controlled media and religious outreach. These propaganda techniques often rely on fear and disinformation – and sometimes violence – to persuade or manipulate their audience. While the Internet is chock full of state-sponsored propaganda, the tried-and-true media of television, radio and print remain widely used.

Good propaganda avoids outright lies, which are clumsy, crude and often counterproductive. Instead, good propaganda shows you something seemingly true or at least difficult to debate. Once those information packets reach the right neurons in your brain, they’re understood in a different light, one favourable to the propagandist. A savvy "spin doctor" can convince the brains of people far and wide to unknowingly build a false narrative of reality. As mentioned, propaganda works best when it applies fallacious arguments to reality—not when it forgoes reality altogether.

Good propagandists are, first and foremost, consummate cherry pickers. While untruths may be told about unverifiable facts – especially in service of the "Big Lie" – the truth offers far greater utility.

"In propaganda, truth pays," said British military officer Richard Crossman, the deputy director of the Psychological Warfare Division, a joint Anglo-American organization during the Second World War.⁵ "It is a complete delusion to think of the brilliant propagandist as being a professional liar. The brilliant propagandist is the man who tells the truth, or that selection of the truth which is requisite for his purpose, and tells it in such a way that the recipient does not think he is receiving any propaganda. ... The art of propaganda is not telling lies, but rather selecting the truth you require and giving it mixed up with some truths the audience wants to hear."

Since the Second World War, propaganda has served as one of two main approaches to government-driven persuasion: it’s persuasion by propaganda or persuasion by gun (and often, it's a mix of both). The former approach’s concept spans modern human history: Ed Bernays wrote Propaganda in 1928, half a decade after Crystallizing Public Opinion and well before “propaganda” became a term of abuse. But its many iterations were remarkably crude until the latest world war began near the end of the 1930s.

The gun has always been the simpler choice—tried, true, effective.

But propaganda offers another path to victory, one well worth an exploration. I’ll have more on that later.

1. Look, I have no personal aversion to recycling, but I think reducing and reusing are more beneficial approaches to protecting the environment. Secondly (and the real reason we’re here), the uneconomical and inefficient nature of the modern recycling industry bears a resemblance to the pre-reform postal system of early 19th-century Britain. In 2018, I wrote a three-part series for Canadian Stamp News (Vol. 43 #14-16) highlighting Great Britain’s mid-19th century postal reforms. See part one here.

2. We all have different tastes. But for as long as I can remember, the words "blog" and its predecessor "weblog" have appeared to my senses as aesthetic abominations. It's an irrational distaste and one I hold despite finding people who lament certain words insufferable ("moist"). But to assuage my cringe reflex, I'll avoid using “blog” and “weblog” going forward.

3. For the uncultured among us (and anyone under age 30), philately refers to the collection and study of postage stamps, postal history and related artifacts. Many sources claim French stamp collector Georges Herpin coined the term (“philatélie”) in 1864. In the Nov. 15, 1864-dated issue of Le Collectionneur de Timbres-poste, Herpin wrote, “Philatelie est formé de deus mots grecs” (“Philately is made up of two Greek words”). He combined the Greek root word “phil,” meaning “to love,” with “atelēs,” another ancient Greek word meaning “free from tax or charge,” which “nearly matched the concept of what a postage stamp does,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. “It is a reminder of the original function of postage stamps: the cost of letter-carrying formerly was paid by the recipient; a stamp indicated that carriage had been pre-paid by the sender, thus indicating to the recipient’s postmaster that the letter so stamped was ‘carriage-free.’”

4. Oxford Languages, whose English dictionaries stand among the world’s most authoritative sources on current English, defines a logophile as "a lover of words." A portmanteau, logophile combines the Greek root word "logos" (referring to "words" or "language") with the suffix "-phile" (meaning "lover" or "enthusiast").

5. The Psychological Warfare Division’s stated goals included:

• waging psychological warfare against the enemy;

• using various media to sustain the morale of people of friendly nations occupied by the enemy;

• conducting propaganda directed toward a military force and designed to ensure compliance with the instructions of the commander of the occupying force; and

• controlling information services in Allied-occupied Germany.