“When You See This Sign…”: The Power of Silence in Propaganda

“The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative”—so claimed a man that knew a thing or two about manipulating masses into consent, Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, the man behind the striking imagery that accompanies our idea of what propaganda is. However, the assertion seems paradoxical: How was it possible for propaganda to function implicitly when its very existence was proclaimed through an official state ministry? How can explicit manipulation convince people they are acting on their own free will? And if even the notorious Nazi propaganda apparatus was able to subtly manipulate audiences, what are the implications for contemporary propaganda that operates without a state ministry and must frequently employ less overt tactics to advance an ideology?

To answer these questions, we must acknowledge that propagandistic language is not made of words alone—carefully chosen and deployed, designed to persuade or deceive. Propaganda is also made of silence. And it is specifically silence that has historically served as a strategic tool for promoting (often harmful) ideologies. This raises further crucial questions: If silence can function propagandistically, how exactly does it work? What mechanisms allow an absence—something that is not said—to communicate something, sometimes even more effectively than utterances themselves? It is precisely by understanding the role of silence in propaganda, how it is used to convey content, that we can make sense of Goebbels’ claim.

Let’s start by giving a general account of the two common understandings of silence in propaganda, which we shall call the Propaganda of Silence and Silence Propaganda.

The Propaganda of Silence is what we would generally describe as censorship in its most straightforward form. Censorship constitutes a form of propaganda when it involves the deliberate suppression of content and information in order to support an ideology. It occurs when an actor holds power over information channels (such as news media, universities, Internet access, etc.) and restricts public access to certain information—i.e., when national media outlets limit coverage of certain events that happen outside the country. By controlling what is and is not made available, such an actor shapes the dominant narrative in ways that serve ideological ends.

Silence Propaganda, by contrast, operates by encouraging citizens to silence themselves—what can be described as self-censorship or, better yet, silencing. For instance, it is quite common to find silence propaganda in World War II posters that bear slogans such as “Silence means security” or “Quiet! Loose talk can cost lives.” One can certainly say that the stated goal was to prevent military intelligence from reaching the enemy; however, these campaigns simultaneously cultivate a culture of self-restraint in normal citizens. Voicing doubts or asking critical questions became socially and politically suspect. Silence propaganda thus aims to suppress public discussion altogether, foreclosing the possibility of questioning the dominant narrative.

What both these approaches have in common is that they treat silence as an absence: an absence of information and of communication. But there is a third, less, so to say, explicit way that silence operates, in which it is considered not an absence but a tool that—like words—conveys specific (and possibly harmful) content. Let’s step aside from propaganda for a moment and consider the following example. In 1997, Apple launched its iconic “Think Different” campaign, a campaign aimed to position the brand among those who, by thinking differently, changed the world. It was an effective campaign with a syntactically incomplete slogan. Think different…from whom? The adverb “different” in this context demands a prepositional complement. The linguist Michal Ephratt, from whom I took the Apple example, considers the syntactic absence in the slogan an instance of silence, a communicative silence (she calls it verbal silence). In other words, when the speaker omits something with the intention of communicating something through that absence, we can say that the silence in question is communicative. By omitting a comparison (think different from someone), Apple is able to communicate, without explicitly stating it, that its users think differently from—and by implication are better than—users of any competitor products.

What we learn form the Apple example is that silence can be used to convey very specific content—we all understand, “Think different from any competitor,” and not, “Think different from bananas.” The question we now turn to is how this tool can then be used in propaganda as support for a (possibly harmful) ideology. We’ll see that silence is particularly effective (and I’ll argue even more effective than spoken words) when it’s used to create an enemy and to foster an us-versus-them dynamic—which is one of the fundamental goals of propaganda as explained by Jason Stanley.

In 1941, the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda distributed a poster that reads: “Wenn Du dieses Zeichen siehst…” (“When you see this symbol…”). The symbol in question is the Star of David marked with the word Jude (Jew). The silence here is clear, even indicated by the ellipsis (the three dots) representing the main clause to which the temporal subordinate clause introduced by “when” refers, as in: When you see this symbol…do something. But do what exactly? Under the antisemitic Nazi regime, which daily incited citizens to racial hatred against Jews, it is automatically a bad something.

Propaganda acts in accordance with and reinforces (often harmful) flawed ideological beliefs. The flawed ideological belief to which the poster refers, intending to arouse fear, is that Jews are dangerous to the German people. Aware of this flawed ideology, we too can complete the poster by adding the missing information. The poster then should read: “When you see this symbol…recognize the person that wears it as an enemy and act accordingly.”

Silence here is communicative and conveys specific content, prejudiced against the Jewish population.

We know Nazi propaganda openly said way worse things about Jews (take a look at any of the many editions of the infamous newspaper Der Stürmer). Why would it be more effective to use silence instead of spelling out the antisemitic messages?

Because silence does something words cannot: it makes the audience complicit.

The absence of specific instructions for what to do when seeing that symbol—the six-pointed star—gives the reader a certain freedom in completing the sentence. Considering the historical context, the poster’s content inevitably took on a threatening character towards Jews, encouraging an antisemitic response. However, it was up to the reader to determine the degree of violence. The poster can equally communicate “When you see this symbol…be suspicious,” “When you see this symbol…attack or insult whomever is wearing it,” or, in the extreme, “When you see this symbol…kill the one who’s wearing it.”

When we actively fill in the gaps left by propaganda, even unconsciously, we shift from being just the addressee, the passive recipient of propaganda, to becoming the addresser. And here’s the psychological twist: we don’t fact-check ourselves. We trust content that comes from us more than content imposed upon us. We exercise less critical vigilance over ideas we’ve partly constructed ourselves.

The specific unarticulated content of the poster (whether it is “be suspicious,” “insult,” “attack,” or “kill”) comes from the recipient, not the Ministry of Propaganda, who thus escapes responsibility for any specific hateful action. Technically, they never explicitly called for it.

You thought of it yourself.

Irene Lo Faro

Irene Lo Faro is a doctoral student and lecturer at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität in Bamberg, Germany. The focus of her research is silence in communication, specifically in hate speech; in the past she focused on National Socialist propaganda. Currently, she couples academic work with public outreach by sharing on her social media titbits of philosophy of language.