Propaganda: How Can We Find the Truth in a World Saturated with Propaganda?

Where Does Benjamin Speak From?

Hear me now Lord. Tell them call pan Fari. The whole of the youth and them fe say Rasta Fari.

Before even confronting propaganda, Benjamin makes clear the position from which he is speaking. These opening lines are not a conventional introduction. They establish a standpoint: Benjamin addresses Jah before addressing the world, then calls on the youth to turn towards Rastafari.

This immediately creates a contrast between two sources of authority. On one side stands the media discourse of Babylon, whose mechanisms of propaganda the song will go on to expose. On the other stands a voice placed, from the very beginning, under the authority of Jah and Rastafari — a voice that does not claim to be neutral, but openly declares where it stands before beginning to deconstruct the system's perspective.

This is no minor detail. The critique of propaganda is not delivered from a supposedly universal standpoint, free of assumptions. It is expressed from a particular position — Rastafari — which is precisely what the song seeks to communicate. And the circular structure of the track confirms this: it opens with an invocation of Jah and Rastafari and closes with Selassie, Ethiopia, the ancestors, and Word Sound and Power.

A Single Word, Standing Alone

Propaganda. Propaganda. Propaganda.

The song does not begin by explaining. It begins by naming. A single word, repeated insistently, before any analysis takes place. This gesture holds back the explanation in order to isolate the phenomenon itself and make the listener aware of its full scope.

From the outset, an important distinction emerges: the difference between a lie and propaganda. A lie concerns a particular fact: it can be disproved by establishing what actually happened. Propaganda operates at a deeper level. It organises a whole set of representations through which we assign meaning and value to facts themselves.

That is why replacing false information with accurate information is not necessarily enough. We can correct a fact while leaving intact the system of representations that allowed us to assign it a particular value in the first place. Propaganda becomes truly powerful when its categories seem so natural to us that we no longer even recognise that they could be questioned.

And this is the question that structures the entire song: at what level does propaganda really operate?

From Distorted Facts to a Shaped Perception of Reality

In its most common sense, propaganda refers to the manipulation of information: media outlets that distort or exploit facts, governments that rewrite history, narratives that impose a particular interpretation of reality. Benjamin begins here: Propaganda news media. His initial target is clear. But the song immediately broadens the issue.

Oh gash original man, he was black, he was an African, carbon. Science will show that and prove that over and over again.

The accumulation of terms in this line deserves closer attention: Original man, he was black, he was an African, carbon.Here, Benjamin brings together Africa, blackness, and carbon.

Carbon is one of the fundamental chemical elements of life on Earth: the major molecules that make up living organisms are based on carbon chemistry. This sequence of terms draws a connection between different facts, bringing them together in a single movement: behind the diversity of today's human populations lies a shared African origin; behind the differences between living beings lies a common fundamental material composition. Benjamin thus connects two realities that science can establish, each within its own field.

This is precisely the opposite of the process of propaganda that the song gradually brings to light. Where systems of representation divide, establish hierarchies, and eventually make differences in status appear natural, Benjamin goes back to more fundamental realities: a shared human origin and a common living matter.

When an Interpretation Comes to Seem Natural

The next part of the song initially seems to move through a series of unusual associations that, once again, appear at first to have little connection with the question of propaganda.

Black is absorption of all light and color

So hear me little systa, in the earth and in the sky are the cycles of your womb

See yourself precious once again

Benjamin has just referred to a physical property of black. In the following line, he addresses a woman and draws a connection between the cycles of her body and those of the earth and the sky. What is the relationship between a property of light, the female body, and propaganda?

These elements belong to different fields. Yet, both in the case of the colour black and in that of women, Vaughn Benjamin invites us to return to concrete realities in order to reveal the gap between those realities and the value that has come to be assigned to them.

In other words, he returns to a reality upon which cultural representations have constructed a particular value, then questions that value by examining the reality itself. Black is one of the clearest examples.

Black is the color of our Solar System.

Out of blackness was born the light.

Black is the color of the whole universe.

Your morning starts with darkness.

Here, Benjamin brings together several different levels that need to be distinguished: the darkness of space, the absorption of light, the night that precedes the day, and the symbolic meaning of black. The poetic strength of these lines lies precisely in the constant movement between these different levels.

In a symbolic tradition deeply rooted in Western culture, light has become associated with knowledge, truth, and enlightenment, while blackness or darkness has been associated with ignorance, danger, or nothingness.

The song seems to suggest that there is nothing inevitable about these symbolic associations:

Your morning starts with darkness.

Vaughn Benjamin returns to a simple observation drawn from everyday reality: every day begins in darkness.

From this perspective, darkness is no longer simply what stands in opposition to light. It can also represent what comes before it, even the point from which a new day becomes possible.

Benjamin thus separates a reality from the cultural value that has been attached to it. Blackness does not naturally carry ignorance, evil, or inferiority within it. These meanings are interpretations. And once another interpretation becomes possible, their supposed self-evidence disappears.

From this perspective, the very name of the group seems to embody this logic. Mid-nite draws attention to the moment when nothing is yet visible, but a new day has already begun. The darkest moment is not necessarily an ending: it can also mark a beginning or a renewal.

The hourglass featured on the cover of Unpolished may also evoke this cyclical logic: when one cycle comes to an end, turning the hourglass over makes another possible.

Through this first reflection on blackness, the critique of propaganda becomes more profound.

A reality exists first; a culture then assigns it meaning and value. But over time, that value can come to seem as though it naturally belongs to the reality itself. What was once an interpretation begins to appear simply as a given.

Propaganda therefore becomes particularly difficult to identify when it no longer needs to explicitly assert a hierarchy: that hierarchy is already embedded in the categories through which the world is perceived.

IV. From Representations of the World to the Way We See Ourselves

It is within this same logic that the passage addressing women takes on its full significance.

Black is absorption of all light and color. So hear me little systa, in the earth and in the sky are the cycles of your womb.

The word so is important. Vaughn Benjamin does not appear to abandon his argument in order to suddenly change the subject. He himself establishes a continuity between what he has just said about blackness and what he now says to the little systa. He does something with the female body that closely resembles what he has just done with blackness: he returns to a reality while distinguishing it from the hierarchical value that may have been assigned to it. Differences associated with the female body have been used, within male-dominated social structures, to justify differences in status and hierarchies between the sexes.

Here, Midnite reverses that movement.

The cycles of the female body do not signify inferiority. They are connected to the cycles of the earth and the sky, acquiring a generative and cosmic dimension. This does not mean, however, that motherhood should be treated as an exhaustive definition of female identity. The song does not claim to define what a woman is in her entirety. Benjamin draws upon a specific capacity of the female body within a more precise argument: just as with the colour black, he shows that a characteristic to which a hierarchy may assign an inferior value can be viewed very differently once we return to what that characteristic makes possible.

And above all, he adds:

See yourself precious once again.

The words once again are decisive. Benjamin does not simply tell the woman that she is precious. He asks her to see herself as precious once again. The wording therefore suggests that something needs to be recovered in the way she sees herself — without Benjamin specifying when or how that sense of value was lost.

Here, the problem of propaganda reaches the individual subject. Domination no longer consists simply in someone else considering you inferior. It reaches its deepest form when those who have been devalued begin to see their own existence through the very categories that have devalued them. This logic directly extends what Benjamin was already exploring in Bushman. In that song, Benjamin showed how a term such as Bushman could carry a representation of savagery to the point where savagery appeared to be a natural characteristic of those it described.

In Propaganda, the problem becomes broader: it is no longer only certain words that carry a hierarchy, but the very frameworks through which we perceive the world and ourselves.

Propaganda, then, does not merely provide the wrong answers. It can determine the standpoint from which the questions themselves are asked.

We are hurt for the hurt of the daughters of our people. She and her tears could find no comforter.

These words echo the Book of Lamentations, where Jerusalem, personified as an abandoned woman, weeps without finding anyone to comfort her.

Benjamin takes up this image to express the suffering of the women of his people.

But he does not stop at lamentation:

Our hands are again strong. We will be there for our daughters.

Where Lamentations repeatedly evokes the absence of anyone to offer comfort, Benjamin declares: We will be there.

The movement developed throughout the song now finds a practical consequence. Establishing the facts was not enough. It was also necessary to question the value our representations had assigned to them and to correct the way of seeing that had been constructed around those representations. But this transformation in perception, in turn, creates a moral responsibility. Seeing differently does not simply mean replacing a negative representation with a positive one. Recognising the value of those whom a hierarchy has devalued must also transform the way we act towards them.

The movement thus becomes: see differently, recognise differently, act differently. For Vaughn Benjamin, knowledge is never merely contemplative. Freeing oneself from a representation means ceasing to reproduce, through one's actions, the hierarchy that this representation had made seem self-evident.

Tracing Results Back to What Made Them Possible

All aboard. I'm not leaving without my contributions accounted for. I'm not leaving your vineyard without the groundwork accounted for.

After exploring origins, symbols, and the way women are perceived, Benjamin introduces one final form of erasure: that of the work that came before.

Groundwork refers to the foundational work, patient and often invisible, that makes everything else possible.

The vineyard metaphor implicitly contrasts what can be seen — the fruit — with the work that had to be done for that fruit to exist.

Accounted for expresses a demand for recognition: to acknowledge, to take into account, and not to allow a contribution to disappear behind its result.

Propaganda thus produces a form of amnesia about causes: it makes us lose sight of the conditions that made what we see possible. It presents a world that already exists while erasing the processes, people, and origins from which that world emerged. What exists then appears to be simply self-evident. This is why the response offered by Propaganda consistently involves reversing that movement: tracing results back to what made them possible, moving from the present towards its history, and from representations towards the realities upon which they were built.

Man will learn to humble to his knees.

Many live and die unnecessarily.

Many live and die still pretending.

Within the logic developed by the song, this return to origins ultimately seems to call for a transformation in the individual's attitude. Humility can then be understood as the ability to stop treating one's own representations as the self-evident measure of reality. Many live and die unnecessarily / Many live and die still pretending remains more open to interpretation. But still pretending at least extends one of the song's central questions: the possibility of going through an entire life without ever questioning the representations through which we have learned to see the world.

Conclusion — Recovering a Foundation

Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess Rasta Fari Selassie I live.

Go down a Ithiopia.

The ancient ancestors call from our bloodlines, they remember.

Word sound and power will over.

The end of the song returns to its starting point. Selassie, Ethiopia, and the ancestors reconnect with the invocation of Jah and Rastafari that opened the song. This return helps us understand the movement Benjamin has followed.

Faced with propaganda, he constantly seeks to recover what our representations have come to conceal: facts, origins, history, and those who came before us. At its heart, the gesture remains the same: returning to what has been forgotten in order to see differently what once seemed obvious. Propaganda, then, does not simply falsify what we know. It can separate what exists from what made it possible, turn that separation into a hierarchy, and then make that hierarchy appear natural. When sufficiently internalised, it can even shape the standpoint from which an individual sees themselves.

See yourself precious once again.

To think critically against propaganda is therefore to reverse this movement: from representations back to facts, from results back to their conditions, from the present back to its history, and from the individual back to the categories through which they have learned to see themselves.

This is also what gives the final return to Haile Selassie and Ethiopia its full significance.

For Rastafari, Selassie represents more than a religious figure. The very existence of an African emperor, ruling over an Ethiopia that had become a major symbol of resistance to colonial domination, offered Black populations marked by slavery and colonialism another possible representation of Africa, sovereignty, and their own dignity.

Benjamin does not therefore seek to escape propaganda by abandoning all symbols.

He also seeks a foundation from which perception can be rebuilt.

For him, Jah, Rastafari, Ethiopia, Selassie, and the ancestors constitute that foundation: a memory and a set of symbols through which what had been devalued can be seen differently.

The ancient ancestors call from our bloodlines, they remember.

What has been forgotten must be recovered. What has been made inferior must be seen differently. What seemed natural must become open to question again.

Perhaps this is how Propaganda extends the process of overstanding begun with Bushman: no longer simply asking whether a statement is true, but questioning the standpoint from which we have learned to see it.