Protection Stories. A case of military propaganda?

Abstract

In this chapter we analyse one particular military commercial. It was released in 2014 as part of a series of commercials commissioned by the Norwegian Armed Forces Media Centre to promote an understanding in the population for why a country needs an armed force. This particular ad is in the form of a short video. Our question is whether it can be considered to be propaganda – a question of some importance to the military, which would lose a lot of the public standing it aims to gain if it was identified as a propagandist. The ad is built up of two stories of protection, one domestic and one military. It thus has the structure of an analogy, and we analyse it in some detail to determine whether the domestic protection story serves or can serve as an argument for the military protection story. Based on an exploration of the structural and narrative affordances of the ad and on the lack of both considerations and counter-considerations, we conclude that the ad can be categorized as propaganda. Albeit, we argue, propaganda of a somewhat unorthodox kind.