"While we have entertained the contention that a deed may make more propaganda than hundreds of speeches, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of pamphlets, we have held that an arbitrary act of violence will not necessarily have such an effect"
About this Quote
Propaganda, for Johann Most, isn’t primarily a matter of persuasion; it’s a matter of force made legible. The line pivots on a ruthless communications insight: action can eclipse rhetoric, but only certain kinds of action. He’s working in the late-19th-century ecosystem of exile politics, labor unrest, and state repression, where pamphlets and speeches flooded immigrant neighborhoods yet rarely dented entrenched power. “A deed” promises a shortcut through the noise - a spectacle that can’t be ignored, a headline that bypasses hostile editors and bored audiences.
The subtext is strategic, almost managerial. Most is not romanticizing violence as catharsis; he’s cautioning against mistaking shock for political clarity. “Arbitrary” is doing heavy lifting: violence without a narrative frame, a target that reads as random, risks producing the wrong propaganda - fear, backlash, justification for crackdowns, and a public newly sympathetic to the state. He’s drawing a line between violence as symbolic communication (the deed as message) and violence as mere rupture (the deed as chaos).
That makes the quote less a moral argument than a media theory for insurgents: attention is not consent, and spectacle is not automatically meaning. Most is trying to discipline revolutionary appetite, redirecting it from vengeance to instrumentality. The irony is that he’s also admitting the revolution’s dependency on interpretation. If the deed doesn’t come pre-loaded with an intelligible story about power, grievance, and legitimacy, it will be narrated by police, judges, and newspapers - and that’s propaganda too, just not his.
The subtext is strategic, almost managerial. Most is not romanticizing violence as catharsis; he’s cautioning against mistaking shock for political clarity. “Arbitrary” is doing heavy lifting: violence without a narrative frame, a target that reads as random, risks producing the wrong propaganda - fear, backlash, justification for crackdowns, and a public newly sympathetic to the state. He’s drawing a line between violence as symbolic communication (the deed as message) and violence as mere rupture (the deed as chaos).
That makes the quote less a moral argument than a media theory for insurgents: attention is not consent, and spectacle is not automatically meaning. Most is trying to discipline revolutionary appetite, redirecting it from vengeance to instrumentality. The irony is that he’s also admitting the revolution’s dependency on interpretation. If the deed doesn’t come pre-loaded with an intelligible story about power, grievance, and legitimacy, it will be narrated by police, judges, and newspapers - and that’s propaganda too, just not his.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by Johann
Add to List
